"I was kind of, really mad, sort of... I was trying to think back, 'What did I miss? What did I do wrong?'"

That's what Abhinav Venigalla thought when he fell 10 points short of a perfect score on the math SAT, which he took in 7th grade as part of a part of a Johns Hopkins University competition.

Factor that into your thinking about teaching kids self-esteem.

"Study: Many college students not learning to think critically."

Not surprising.

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study....

I'd like a study analyzing whether the professors know how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument, and objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event.

Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education known for his theory of multiple intelligences, said the study underscores the need for higher education to push students harder.

"No one concerned with education can be pleased with the findings of this study," Gardner said. "I think that higher education in general is not demanding enough of students — academics are simply of less importance than they were a generation ago."

But the solution, in Gardner's view, shouldn't be to introduce high-stakes tests to measure learning in college because, "The cure is likely to be worse than the disease."

Hmm. Continuing my refocus to the failings of the teacher, let's analyze the critical thinking skills of Harvard professor Howard Gardner. Faculty ought to push students harder, but not resort to high-stakes testing? Why not? What's "likely" to be worse about that solution? Gardner blathers out some verbiage in pseudo-response to the study. He sounds as though he just knee-jerk hates the pressure of exams. Presumably, it has something to do with his famous theory of multiple intelligences, but I wish he'd be honest and specific about why he thinks these things.

How about adding to the list of "intelligences" the capacity to evade critical thinking without getting caught?

"There was a moment during the test when my mind drifted to her funeral and melancholy began to overtake me."

"At that point, I noticed a scent of hairspray—the same one my grandma used for the past 60 years. I teared up, knowing that she was right there with me and she was proud of me."

IN THE COMMENTS: Everybody's talking about what their grandmothers smelled like. Mine smelled like: 1. lemonade, watermelon, and chicken & dumplings, and 2. knitting wool and African violets.

"Due to the blizzard and extremely hazardous travel conditions, we will not give the Civ Pro I exam for first year students today..."

Blizzard Day! Do you like that, when you've studied and you're ready to go, and looking forward to an afternoon of post-exam relaxation, and now — what? — more studying? Or do you get out there and build that snowman?

Standardized testing has embarrassed teachers into facing the fact that they've been grading kids for compliance and pleasing.

That's what I extract from this pretty garbled NYT op-ed. And by garbled I mean stuff like this:

“Over time, we began to realize that many teachers had been grading kids for compliance — not for mastering the course material,” [middle school principal Katie] Berglund said. “A portion of our A and B students were not the ones who were gaining the most knowledge but the ones who had learned to do school the best.”....

As test scores fast become the single and most powerful measurement by which educational outcomes are being judged, more schools might find themselves engaged in what has become a pivotal debate: Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized and hard-working? Or should good grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?

How did the word "exclusively" get into that last question? It seems obvious to me that schools should give achievement in learning the primary place it deserves and should also demand appropriate behavior. Students need to be decently well-behaved, diligent, and organized, but it's wrong to treat teacher's-pet-type students as if they are the best. That drives many smart kids into rebellion. And, frankly, it's likely to create unnecessary problems for lots of boys. And it doesn't do girls any favors either, since real careers aren't about handing in all the homework and pleasing the authority figure.

ADDED: I'm told that the Week In Review pieces like this are properly referred to as news "analysis," and not "op-eds."

The gay bar next to the mosque next to Ground Zero.

Okay... but then what? It's an interesting progression, worthy of a standardized test.

What's next in the series that begins Ground Zero, mosque, gay bar...? Help me compose the multiple choice question options. When you've done that and identified the correct answer, compose a multiple choice question based on the new series of items. Continue in this fashion until you're ready to write an essay on why you think this conversation in the form of retaliatory expressive architecture has to end and how you propose to end it.

"If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city..."

"... then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights. And I refuse to accept that."

"So the best thing you can do for your career is to go to the crappiest law school you can get into and dominate your competition?"

"That sounds vaguely anti-intellectual. Shouldn’t students want to compete against the best, as opposed to dominate the weak? Sander and Yakowitz apparently believe that students shouldn’t 'trade-up' and transfer to better law schools if they have the opportunity."

Well, "crappiest" seems to be an exaggeration. It seems to argue for going to a law school where you will be in the high end of the LSAT/GPA numbers admitted. You don't have to be a big outlier, just nicely within the usual top end. Then work hard but comfortably and rank at the top of your class.

You know, some of us are — against our will — forced into essentially that strategy because our soft credentials suck. I know. I applied to law schools with a BFA degree, a painting major, 5 years of unimpressive day jobs, and the lack of savvy and sophistication to bullshit my way out of it in my personal statement.

Now, to look at another angle: Affirmative action pushes students into the opposite strategy. If Sander and Yakowitz are right, doesn't it mean that affirmative action harms those it means to help?

All the best people fail the bar exam... Elizabeth Wurtzel says.

And she's among the people she's talking about:

The common denominator among the bar-failers in my class at Yale Law School—and there were a few—was a complete inability to comply with senseless rules; they weren’t the best students, but they were the tartest and the sharpest people—and the least likely to accept the constraints of Big Law that make neither financial nor intellectual sense: the fifty-state survey to prove a negative, the memo to nowhere, the repetitive brief that says nothing and gets read by no one.

Hey! That's one sentence. It's got 3 dashes, a semicolon, 3 commas, and a colon. Let me step back from the big meta- critique and extrapolate one easily followed item of advice: Write short sentences! Human beings grade bar exam essays. I have graded bar exam essays. It's hell. I was trapped in a hotel conference room and not allowed to leave until I'd graded a pile of exams that, as a lawprof, I'd take a couple weeks to grade (with refreshing breaks for snacks and walks and blog posts).

Wurtzel goes on to claim that the practice of law would be better if the sharp, tart folks who resist senseless rules had the advantage in seeking access to the profession.  Imagine the access ritual that would vault them to the front of the line. I would try to do that for you right now if I weren't distracted by thinking that writers of short sentences are the ones to be encouraged. Don't write a long sentence unless you have a good reason. And don't use a semicolon unless you'd be willing to pay $5 for the privilege of using a semicolon. Each time. That's just a test I made up. Now, stop annoying me. And don't make things more difficult than they need to be. That's a rule. It's not a senseless one. It is a rule brimming with sensibility.

Why are people acting surprised by this NYT article about law schools adjusting student grade point averages upward?

Here's the Times article. Memeorandum collects the reactions.

I saw the NYT article yesterday and decided it wasn't worth blogging, but I'm blogging it now because it's getting blogged and only to say that I consider this news a huge bore in light of the fact that law students' grades are always adjusted on a curve.

It's not as if the students previously got the grades they deserved and now the grades are phony. When  lawprofs grade law school exams, we may start with raw scores that represent what we really think of them, but the final grades are determined by the school's predetermined goals for averages and percentages at the various grade levels. If the school thinks those averages and percentages are set in the wrong place and it can reset them.

It never had to do with the actual performance of the students. It was always about where the school, as a matter of policy, decided the grades ought to be. It was always about communicating with law firms and other employers in the hope of advantaging our graduates in comparison to other law schools' graduates. We're all lawyers here. This is all advocacy. Are you actually surprised?

The 1-word exam.

A tradition at Oxford, scrapped.

Hey! Business Insider used my picture without attribution!

Look here! Scroll down. See?


(Enlarge.)

That is a picture of me working on my last law school exam. I've blogged about it before. My son John scanned it and uploaded it on his Flickr site here.



It has a Creative Commons license, reserving some rights, and there should be attribution to the photographer, Richard Lawrence Cohen, who was, back then, my husband.

That's not the first time I've seen the picture used like that. It's interesting to me that people see it as a generic hard-working student, since of course I see myself as completely specific. I had a Federal Courts exam to write, and I had a newborn baby a few feet away in our studio apartment. That baby, John, is now 29 years old.

Pet therapy.

For students.

"[C]oncern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa."

"To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis -- will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means."

From a list of Saul Alinsky quotes selected by Right Wing News.

I also liked this story:

The difference between fact and history was brought home when I was a visiting professor at a certain Eastern university. Two candidates there were taking their written examinations for the doctorate in community organization and criminology. I persuaded the president of this college to get me a copy of this examination and when I answered the questions the departmental head graded my paper, knowing only that I was an anonymous friend of the president. Three of the questions were on the philosophy of Saul Alinksy. I answered two of them incorrectly. I did not know what my philosophy or motivations were; but they did!

I wonder if that is as severe of a criticism of the teachers as he seemed to think. The teachers haed learned and taught Alinsky's philosophy based on what he put in writing, but he had access to his own brain, which was continually creating new material and choosing, when writing, what to include and how to frame things.

Note how he shifted from the phrase "the philosophy of Saul Alinksy" (the subject of the questions) to the "philosophy or motivations" of Saul Alinsky. He had unique access to knowledge of his motivations, and I wonder how honest he was with himself or in his written answer to the questions about what his motivations were (if that's what a question called for). The teachers might have wanted some critical thinking about Alinsky, while he may have flattered himself.

The author is not the best judge of what is contained in his own books, because it is confused with all the other things he thinks and the things he meant to say but didn't or wishes he had (or hadn't) said.

On the other hand, there's Woody Allen's great fantasy of producing the author to refute some jackass's assertion about what is in a book:

A law school contradiction.

2 observations from a 58-year-old marketing professor who just started going to law school:

• The stress level is “scarily high” because of the pressure for good grades, coupled with a demanding workload. “From the very first week of law school, assorted deans stressed that our job prospects upon graduation would be directly related to our first-year grades,” [Steve] Cohen writes. “This is particularly salient inasmuch as we attend a ‘second tier’ law school.”

• Computers in the classroom are a bad idea. “I am utterly shocked by the number of students who spend the entire class on their BlackBerry or Facebook account,” he says. “I find it both stupid and rude.”

It seems to me that if a lot of the students are succumbing to the lure of BlackBerry and Facebook instead of paying attention to class that it relieves pressure on the students who are working hard trying to earn the best grades. I'd look around, see those computer screens on irrelevant websites, and think: Good! Thanks for cushioning the grade curve for me.

The end of the constitutional challenge to Wisconsin's diploma privilege.

The case was settled with a $7500 payment to the plaintiff. Back in December, the judge — Barbara Crabb — decertified what had been a class action (including all the graduates of out-of-state law schools who sought to practice law in Wisconsin and were required, under state law, to take a bar exam when the graduates of Wisconsin law schools — the University of Wisconsin and Marquette — had a "diploma privilege" to skip the exam).

NYU law school exam screwup.

Picture it. You're a first-year law student, knocking yourself out studying for your first round of exams. You're striving along with everyone else for rank in class in a time when jobs are hard to get and tuition is still painfully high. Your grade in Contracts is vitally important...

"I am writing to you about a serious issue that has emerged with respect to Professor Nzelibe’s contracts exam, which was held yesterday. After the exam we were contacted by some students to tell us that the exam consisted of two questions that had both been distributed by Professor Nzelibe to his contracts class at Northwestern last year as practice questions. This is a clear violation of explicit NYU School of Law policy. We know that some students in your class had seen and worked through both questions, and some other students had seen one of the questions."

Exams are graded on a curve, and some of the students you're competing with have seen and worked on the very questions that appear on the exam. Now what? 1. Take another exam, which means putting in another round of studying and worrying that will eat into next semester's energy (and cast a pall on your winter break)? 2. Give everyone in the class a pass/fail grade, which has an effect — though possibly a good one — on your GPA compared to students with other Contracts teachers? 3. Or just have Professor Nzelibe grade the exams as if nothing had ever happened?

#2 seems most fair. It mainly hurts the students who would have done best in Contracts. Maybe they worked hardest in that class or understood the material particularly well. That was the grade that would have pulled up their GPA. It's a windfall for the students who had their biggest problems with Contracts, but basically, no one has to do anymore work and everyone still has a GPA. But they will have a "pass" grade on their transcript they'll have to explain over and over. And this is the option that makes life easiest for the professor. He doesn't have to write another exam, and the work of grading — the least enjoyable part of a lawprof's work — becomes a snap.

So how about a hybrid of ##2&3? The students submit a form choosing whether they want their grade or a Pass/Fail, the professor grades all the exams in the normal way, and the grades are entered as Pass/Fail if the student chose that option. The problem with this is that the students who got the advantage will decline the Pass/Fail option, and their grades, curved against the other students, will reflect the advantage they got. And students who would have gotten their worst grade in Contracts if there had never been a screwup get to exclude that bad grade. So, on average, the students who had Professor Nzelibe will have better GPAs than the students who did not have him. This will affect the job prospects of all of those students.

There is no good solution.

"To say you can’t improve scores is to say you can’t improve students, and I disagree with that."

Said Stanley Kaplan, dead now, at 90.

He began by preparing students for the New York State Regents exams. But when a student showed up in 1946 asking for help on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (as the SAT was then called), he saw an opportunity. And when students later sought his help on medical school exams, he signed them on, too.

For decades his services remained local, marketed to Roman Catholic schools and to yeshivas. Most students arrived by word of mouth. But he gradually began to attract students from around the country....

Despite his growing success, Mr. Kaplan faced resistance from the College Board, which continued to assert that gains from test-preparation courses were minimal. Opposition was so strong, Mr. Kaplan recalled, that some students felt a need to register under false names, like Jane Doe and Albert Einstein.

In Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania student newspaper refused to run his advertisements, and the university denied his requests to hang posters and rent rooms for his courses. He called the opposition “elitist” and distributed T-shirts on campus. Students flocked to his classes.

"Personally, I preferred huge classes with curved grades."

"My theory was those classes always had a bunch of people who had no real interest in the subject, signed up because it was a core subject, and could be relied upon to slack off and make the curve easier for the rest of us."

From the comments on a post at Volokh Conspiracy that advises law students that "An Easy Way to Improve Law School Grades" is to take at least one course where the grade is based on a paper and to involve the professor in commenting on an early draft — a strategy one commenter mocks thusly:

Professors love it when students ask for advice.

"Tell me what to do, oh wise one."

That's the most effective form of brown-nosing.

Believe it or not, some of us lawprofs hate brown-nosing. But I almost hate to say that because I'm afraid of scaring off students who resist the advice that you should talk to your professors so that they get to know you — which helps when you need recommendation letters — and because you can have some interesting and enlightening conversations outside of class. I don't want them to think oh, she hates brown-nosing and she's going to think I'm a brown-noser.

The "empathy" exam.

Here's the exam from my Constitutional Law II class:

On May 1, having received notice that Justice Souter will retire, President Obama said:

Now, the process of selecting someone to replace Justice Souter is among my most serious responsibilities as President. So I will seek somebody with a sharp and independent mind and a record of excellence and integrity. I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives — whether they can make a living and care for their families; whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation.

I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes. I will seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role. I will seek somebody who shares my respect for constitutional values on which this nation was founded, and who brings a thoughtful understanding of how to apply them in our time.

Let’s assume that the President — who used to teach constitutional law — has arrived at this preference through studying the cases that we studied in this course. [We studied equal protection and due process.] He might see various of the opinions as the product of “some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book.” Other opinions might seem to him to spring from an awareness of “how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives — whether they can make a living and care for their families; whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation” and so forth.

Don’t assume the listed “daily realities” are the only “daily realities” that he thinks a Justice should “understand and identify with” to “arrive at just decisions and outcomes.” And consider that he merges this “quality of empathy” with dedication to the rule of law, honor for constitutional traditions, and respect for “the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role.”

Where, in the cases that we studied, has it mattered whether a Justice followed abstract theories and dry text from case books instead of the things the President wants from a Supreme Court Justice? Choose specific opinions (majority, concurring, or dissenting) ... that illustrate the two types of judicial reasoning that the President contrasted....

[L]ooking at the opinions you have written about, take a position on the importance of the quality of empathy in a Supreme Court Justice.

I read nearly 60 exams, and it was interesting to see which cases were chosen in the 2 categories. One case clearly won the prize for most empathetic. Perhaps you can guess. Interestingly, one opinion that was frequently presented as empathetic was also cited a few times as an example of the abstract type. That's not surprising: a judge driven to a conclusion by empathy might strive mightily to present the decisionmaking process in dryly abstract terms.

(The students took the exam before Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor.)

ADDED: Thanks to Glenn Reynolds and Jonathan Adler for linking. It's especially interesting to see the comments over at Volokh Conspiracy, and a couple readers thought my question was "ridiculous" or "unfair," so let me say this. First, it was an open book/open notes exam — so there is no value to getting students to recite doctrine. Second, in my conlaw classes, we concentrate on the different approaches to interpretation, and the exam tests for that. Third, my students had examples of my old exams and had every reason to expect something like this. A few days before the exam, I was sitting in a café and a student came up to me and just had to tell me that "Facebook was lit up" with my students trying to predict the question. There was a lot of focus on the Souter retirement. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the predictions came very close to the actual question asked.

Some Volokh commenters imagine that I had particular cases that I wanted the students to present as the right answers. I absolutely did not. What I gave most credit for was serious engagement with the problem of empathy — how it can extend to both sides in many cases and the different ways that empathy is expressed in the language of the cases. I especially liked when students broke through the surface of empathy vs. abstraction and did not simply convert it to liberal vs. conservative. I myself am convinced that Justice Scalia's interest in tradition springs from an emotional place. Read his dissents in United States v. Virginia and Lawrence v. Texas again and think about it. From the Virginia case:

I do not know whether the men of VMI lived by this ["Code of a Gentleman"]; perhaps not. But it is powerfully impressive that a public institution of higher education still in existence sought to have them do so. I do not think any of us, women included, will be better off for its destruction.

I am looking for intellectual engagement with ideas and with the texts of the opinions, and the students did an excellent job (especially with only 3 hours to do it).

And in case you are wondering what opinion won the empathy prize: here it is.