Because I will be teaching abroad for part of the summer, I decided to ignore my conscience and administer a Property exam that was half multiple choice/short-answer and half essay. I know a number of professors are ambivalent about using multiple choice on law school exams, but that the option can be useful (not to mention easier on the professor on the flip side, so to speak). I’ve not yet finished grading, but I’m curious as to (1) whether students study differently when faced with a multiple-choice component on an exam, and (2) whether professors find, consistently, that students who score well on the multiple choice questions also lead the class on the essay portion of the exam. Thoughts?
Posted by Nadine Farid on May 8, 2008 at 03:45 AM
Comments
Frankly, I tend to be relieved by multiple choice-only exams. They can be tiring, and more difficult, but I find them less stressful (even though I’m a writer) than the type of writing involved on essay exams. When I study for a closed-book multiple choice, I pay a lot more attention to details and rules but a lot less attention to policy and individual cases. I just had a Con Law II exam, which unlike the 1L version of Con Law was multiple choice, and I actually found it preferable. It was easy to memorize levels of scrutiny than trying to take into account all the dissents and concurrences as I might do if I were trying to prepare for an essay exam, especially one with a policy question.
Posted by: Judith | May 8, 2008 6:54:02 PM
Property (with rules of inheritance and the rule against perpetuities, for example) seems more suited to multiple-choice/short-answer questions than most other 1L subject matter (ConLaw, I’m looking at you).
From a student perspective, however, I just don’t understand why professors use multiple-choice questions instead of short-answer questions. Clearly grading multiple-choice questions is faster than short answers, but in my experience and anecdotally from other schools, professors cannot resist attaching caveats to multiple-choice questions: no guarantees that the right answer is present, it may be some combination of the four choices, make a note if you spot any ambiguities, etc. A short-answer question still meaningfully limits the amount of grading while allowing students to write out the few sentences required to explain why they think O’s grant to B fails because of the prior conveyance to A.
Personally, I find short-answer questions to be entirely reasonable, whereas I share Jason W’s sentiments on multiple-choice questions. A properly programmed computer, with the full inputs of the black-letter law, could answer multiple-choice questions. That’s not the kind of student law schools are trying to create, is it?
Posted by: rising 2L | May 8, 2008 1:26:44 PM
For multiple choice, I memorize holdings. For essays, I practice analyzing and applying with the professor’s old exams, hypos from class, etc., and I focus on synthesizing the areas of law we studied.
(Why yes, I do in fact have a particular perspective on which type of test is better! Why do you ask?)
Posted by: Jason W. | May 8, 2008 11:08:41 AM
Multiple choice exams are broader than they are deep, which also describes me pretty well. Essays, for me at least, are mostly a matter of luck: Did I concentrate on the areas covered by the essay or waste my time studying a topic that was not/barely relevant to the three questions? Studying for multiple choice exams is less about guessing what will be on the test and mastering that material and more about getting a grip on all aspects of the course.
Posted by: anon | May 8, 2008 10:49:09 AM