Grading is…

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

It’s grading time.  Suddenly, doing anything other than reading exams takes on a new urgency.  A neglected research project must be attended to. The laundry really needs to be folded. Student recommendation letters must be drafted. Even reading a blog post or watching an instructional video about grading seems more appealing than grading itself:

OK.  It’s not really an instructional video.  It’s a hilarious sketch from a Canadian sit-com about an incompetent teacher. If you skipped it, go back and watch it now.  Or better yet, wait until you have graded at least half of your exams or papers and then watch it for comic relief.

Before saying anything further about grading, I want to be clear that real teachers and professors do not bring their papers and exams to bars and ask their friends to grade half of them!  Nor do we skip reading them altogether.  We actually read every single last word on every exam and paper. Which brings us to the question raised by the premise of this blog post, as well as the clip of Mr. D.  Why is grading so awful?  If you ask a random sample of professors, my unscientific guess is that over 90% will say that grading is the worst part of the job. Here is a brief survey of the reasons why, at least for this professor, grading is at best enervating and at worst utterly excruciating.

First, I am going to narrow the focus to exams only. I actually enjoy reading seminar papers. They are all different, and reflect a semester’s worth of interaction and progress.  While slapping a grade on them has the same unsatisfying aspects (described below) of doing so on exams, at least there is a sense that the end product– the original research paper–will have a life beyond the professor’s red pen.

This is not so for exams (or final take-home papers, which are really the same thing.) So here is an incomplete List of Reasons Why Grading Exams is Awful.

*Grading is boring. All the answers say the same thing! Of course they are supposed to.  In fact, it is a sign of a successful class if the majority of the answers say very close to the same thing.  So successful teaching results in monotony.  It is horrible to face this.

*Grading is sorting. If the students are very talented and studious (which most law students are) and the class has been as well taught as possible, then the optimal situation will be that the exams answers are at or above the threshold for having mastered the subject matter taught. That, at least, is my goal for every class I teach: for all of my students to reach a certain level of mastery with the subject matter.  But when we grade, we are not just checking for mastery. We are sorting the students from top to bottom of the class. Our audience for this sorting is very narrow. Many law students will get great jobs and have satisfying careers by gravitating toward aspects of the profession that suit their talents and personalities. A much smaller number will get jobs at elite law firms based in no small part on their grades.  Likewise, a very small number will get federal judicial clerkships based largely on their grades and class standing. So when I am sorting a large class of students from top to bottom, as opposed to evaluating whether they have mastered the material irrespective of where they fall relative to other students, my hidden bosses (elite firms and federal judges) are the ones cracking the whip. I am sorting for them. This forces me to acknowledge something I have spent all semester (and maybe a lifetime) avoiding: that despite my public interest and academic career path, I ended up working for the man.

*Grading is Not-Teaching. Most professors that I know truly love teaching.  Teaching is interacting with students, sparking curiosity and thought and, of course, conveying information and skills. By the time grading happens, the teaching is over. Students in large classes rarely learn anything in the aftermath of the exam. They may, if the exam is well crafted, learn something during the three hours they are sitting for it. But students will not learn much from receipt of the grade.  The small number of students who stop by to see their exam are doing so, understandably, for purely instrumental reasons. They want to know why they received the grade they did, and sometimes how they might improve their performance the next time. But they never want to sit with you for an hour or two and discuss how they might think differently about their response to question II.A., and plumb the depths of the subject matter for all that II.A. demanded and implied. So grading is a terrible anti-climax to teaching. Instead of joining with your students in the learning process, you are alone in your office or at home, reading the dry aftermath of what seemed (and was) so engaging at the time.

*Grading is arbitrary.  To be clear, grading is not arbitrary for the top and the bottom of any class. But for many of us, a defensible distinction between most of the grades in the middle of any group of exams is elusive. We try. We really do. And once, I had the happy occasion of having my own grading consistency confirmed by accident. Two copies of the same exam had been printed, which I did not realize. When I finished the second version of the same exam, I went back to check the previous papers because the wording struck me as very familiar.  Sure enough, a previous paper had the same exam number.  The numerical grades I had given the two were identical. This might have absolved all of my guilt about the imprecision of grading for ever more. But I know better; that was a lucky break.  To be sure, the arbitrariness of the grades in the middle can be mitigated by institutional measures, such as eliminating a published top-to-bottom class rank, and moving from numerical grades to letter grades. My law school has done both, and these changes have lessened considerably the anguish of grading. So maybe it is a hangover from the previous era, but even with these helpful adjustments, I can’t shake the sense of indefensibility for the distinctions I make.  This wouldn’t matter so much if grading were leading to more teaching (see Grading is Not-Teaching above), or if grading had nothing to do with sorting (see Grading is Sorting above.)

*Grading is lonely. That’s why Mr. D. took his exams to a bar. That’s why some of us sit with stacks of papers in coffee shops. Writing can also be lonely. But at least we are alone with our own thoughts, and not the thoughts catalogued above about the solitary and unsatisfying end-product of a semester’s worth of work.

*Grading is goodbye. Because most teachers love teaching, there is something sad about our last communique to our students consisting of a mark on a transcript.  Grading is farewell, and an unsatisfying one at that.

Posted in The BAT Cave | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Monty Python Example No. 3 (Analytical Philosophy in Law)

Posted on May 1, 2012 by

Too much of it arguably reads like this:

In The Concept of Law, H.L.A. Hart once said something.  This brilliant insight (BI) effectively corrected some fundamentally wrongheaded ways of thinking.   Yet upon closer examination, BI encompasses a number of different ideas which can be set forth and examined–each in its own right.

In order to introduce some conceptual clarity, let us begin by defining our terms.  BI can be helpfully subdivided into five distinct possibilities: p, not p, p unless not p, not p unless p, and, of course, the incoherent p and not p which we encounter in less thoroughgoing philosophical work including France.   Other less rigorous possibilities would include occasionally p, randomly p, indeterminately p, and the like.   These and other such possibilities are in their nature insufficiently precise to warrant treatment here.

Putting aside the imprecise and incoherent possibilities as non-starters, we are left with four possibilities.   It is important not to conflate these upon pain of serious error.  The essential point here is that if we can avoid such conflation, the four-part theory advanced here (TAH) will remain intact and available to guide analysis.

Sophisticated readers will, of course, recognize that the application of TAH depends upon the addition of specified empirical conceptual content (SECC).   In turn, where law is concerned, the availability of SECC depends, at least in part, upon further more rigorous work in the social sciences.  Indeed, the currently available work in the social sciences is  largely unsuitable for TAH.

It would be highly unfortunate if TAH and SECC remained incompatible.  It is to be hoped that, in the future, this discordance can be avoided as the social sciences progress and produce better more thoroughgoing SECC.   In the meantime, TAH may help to dispel some of the theoretically muddled thinking so frequently encountered in contemporary legal analysis.

For  further elaboration:

Posted in Experimental, Random Jurisprudence, The BAT Cave | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Wild-ish: Self and Community on the Trail

Posted on April 24, 2012 by

A lot of wilderness narratives go like this.  A man walks alone into the woods/desert/mountains.  He confronts nature in all its glory and terror.  He barely escapes grave danger and returns to tell the tale or/He does not escape grave danger, but nonetheless overcomes blood loss and near starvation and returns to tell the tale or/He disappears without a trace and someone else tells his tale. See, e.g., Into the Wild; Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty; 127 Hours: Between a Rock and Hard Place; and untold numbers of mountaineering and climbing memoirs and biographies.

Cheryl Strayed’s wilderness narrative, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, has some of the classic elements of the genre. Strayed (a name the author adopted after her mother died and her life fell to pieces) sets off alone to have close encounters with nature.  She barely escapes being impaled by a free range bull, almost steps on several rattle snakes, and faces extremes of temperature and terrain.  Also, consistent with a sub-category of the wilderness narrative, many of Strayed’s hardships are caused by her own lack of experience and preparation.  She sets out in new boots that are a size too small.  Her pack weighs twenty pounds more than it should because she has included an amusing array of extras, ranging from a folding saw to a large pack of condoms.  Finally, Strayed’s memoir resonates with aspects of the literature that have a self-discovery/self-help thread.  She hit bottom (profligate drugs, serial infidelity to her husband, and other self-destructive behavior in the wake of her mother’s death and the disintegration of her family), and got lost in the woods to find herself.

Yet unlike the classic versions described above, Strayed’s account is filled with social encounters. Interspersed with stretches of hiking alone, Strayed meets and camps with others on the trail, and takes several detours to avoid heavy snow pack and collect food and supplies. Sometimes she ditches the trek just to give her mangled feet a break.  Because her descriptions of the off-trail food are so vivid, at times it seemed like Strayed was eating fries and drinking Snapple lemonade as often as she was choking down trail mix.  Also, while Strayed wrote the requisite paens to the starry night sky, the jagged and snow-capped peaks, the riot of wild flowers, etc., etc., a great deal of her prose is devoted to feelings about other people.  She is trying to figure out how to live in society, not how to escape from it.

Another striking divergence from the classic wilderness narrative is Strayed’s inclusion of the desecrated parts of her journey.

She hikes through clear-cuts as well as mossy old growth.  This is our world, after all, even the one we escape to.  It bears our marks, our uses, our legacies, including those of our own emotional lives.  Finally, Strayed’s most chilling encounter is not with falling rocks, hungry grizzlies, or cascades of ice and snow, but with a creepy guy. Strayed’s biggest triumphs are those of reckoning with human loss, and the most significant threat to her security comes in human form as well.

One form of wilderness memoir isn’t more important or better than another.  The myth of utter solitude and self-reliance is compelling.  We like to read about it and even live it, from time to time.  But as our country, and its natures, seem to be flying apart under hyper-individualism’s irresistible force, a wilderness narrative that brings our human connections and impacts to the fore is a timely addition to the literature.

(For anyone interested in a more academic discussion of these ideas, see Mountains Without Handrails, Wilderness Without Cellphones, an earlier and much longer riff on the same themes.)

Posted in BAT Reviews, Nature/Culture | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Waiting

Posted on April 1, 2012 by

I have been waiting.  In an airport.   For my flight.  Before that I was waiting in line.  For security.  For passport control.  For baggage drop-off.    I have been waiting all morning.  In line.  My passport and my boarding pass have been checked four times.  I believe they will be checked again.  I no longer bother to put them away.

All this waiting in line must do something to us.  We find our place in line and hold it.  We are so docile.  So accepting.  So resigned.  An achievement of civilization.   If so, the British are way ahead.  In the train stations, they queue up one by one, waiting for the trains to arrive:

So, yes an achievement of civilization–and yet maybe not:

 

 

 

 

 

 

What does it do to us, this waiting?  Stuck in traffic in L.A. listening to KFWB news for the sig alerts?   Waiting at the doctor’s office?   Well, it shortens life expectancy for one thing.  You can’t call waiting much of a life.   Many times I’ve resolved to do something else while waiting—exercises (my left Achilles needs it) deep breathing, outlines for the next post or the next article.   But too often I forget.

Earlier this morning, I made a point of striking up conversations—I was aiming for something beyond the usual small talk.   I was willing to talk about anything.  I even got into a discussion about the famous “hail-mary pass” by Colorado in that great 1994 Michigan game (and I don’t even follow football.)

But now, I’m thinking about waiting.  A subjective attitude really.  An attitude which says something like, “This is not really my life.  My life is on hold.  I am currently a placeholder for my life.  My actual life will start up again in 30 minutes when I’m through with this line, when I get my tickets… my whatever.”  Except not quite:  The serial nature of the waiting (one line follows another) reminds us it’s not true.

What if there were a neurological condition which caused some people to look at life this way all the time?  I mean that they would see each experience as a wait to be followed by another wait.  The waits could be sectioned off.  Invariably it would be waiting for something to end or something else to begin.   Nothing else.  Very much like simula life, actually.   Such people would be placeholders all the time.  “This is not really my life you know—I’m just a placeholder.”

Posted in Experimental, Nature/Culture | Tagged | 1 Comment

Too Much Information, Not Enough Knowledge

Posted on March 26, 2012 by

If you wanted to disappear, where would you go? A small town in southern Utah is a good bet, at least according to its reclusive inhabitants. Yet they know that their days of being off of the information grid are numbered, if not gone already. Indeed, I am posting this courtesy of the town’s wireless internet service.

Still, this corner of the Colorado Plateau thrives on myths of vanishing. From the ancient Puebloans to young Anglo explorers like Everett Ruess, the parched landscape invites tales of unsolved mysteries.  Some are just tales. The theory that the ancient Puebloans vanished without trace or explanation by the end of the thirteenth century has been supplanted by knowledge, much of it from contemporary Hopi and Pueblo people, that the Anasazi (as they are still often mislabeled) migrated due to drought, resource scarcity, and accompanying social and political instability.  They were then absorbed into the Hopi and Pueblo tribes that continue to live in the region today. Some vanishings persist, however.  Everett Ruess, the young Californian who roamed throughout the Navajo Nation and southeastern Utah in the 1920′s and 30′s, disappeared in 1934.  Despite occasional false positives, his body has never been recovered.  Did he fall of a cliff in Davis Gulch, which is now flooded by Glen Canyon? Was he killed by whites or Natives? We may never know, and maybe we don’t want to.

The region’s secrets also used to include the location of the thousands of archeological sites hidden in its cliffs, crags, and washes.  But today, thanks to blogging, published guides, and hand-held gps technology, anyone can plug in a few coordinates and bag as many cliff-dwellings and petroglyphs as possible. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is aware of the problem. Their solution, at least in one resource-rich area, has been to post signs at trailheads warning people not to violate the laws. As one long-time local put it, they might as well have constructed a big neon billboard saying “Cool Ruins and Potsherds– This Way!”  The Plateau’s vast archeological riches are also at risk due to the BLM’s inability to resist interpreting its multiple use mandate as “all uses in all places at all times.”  With increasing pressure to drill for oil and gas in every conceivable location, and at the same time to procure recreation fees for the handful of places off-limits to drilling, the likelihood that the land and its secrets will be left alone is extremely low.

Despite all of the information available, knowledge about the Plateau’s history is ephemeral.  In this little town, for example, there is a struggle between the inhabitants and the LDS Church about who has the higher claim to presenting local history. To protect the town’s identity (at least temporarily, until the reader opens a new tab and does a google search,) I will leave the details to the reader’s imagination. Suffice it to say that the locals believe that they are on the side of historical accuracy as opposed to commemoration. As commemoration ascends, facts and details seem to recede. At the same time, the risks to the region’s archeological resources put the bases for assessing the facts in jeopardy.  Can it be that the more information we have access to, the more we put knowledge at risk?  As it gets harder to sustain the mysteries of a region, does it also become more difficult to discern its truths? It doesn’t have to be this way. There is nothing inevitable about technology revealing too much and yet saying nothing. But there is nothing foregone about this not being so either.

Posted in Nature/Culture, The BAT Cave | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The American Law School (Tentative Notes for Stages of Evolution)

Posted on March 18, 2012 by

Pedagogy

Stage 1: Socratic

Stage 2: Soft Socratic

                      Stage 3: Lecture/Student-oriented Learning

Stage 4: Consumer Preference

Advancement Societies:

Stage 1: Old Boys Club/Old School Tie

Stage 2: Political/Intellectual Interest groupings

Stage 3: Connections

Stage 4: Networking

Scholarship Evaluation (Personnel Actions)

Stage 1: The Tenure Article

Stage 2: Multiple Articles

Stage 3: Citation rates/Download Rates/Faculty ranking

Stage 4: Brand Recognition

Media Outreach by Faculty

Stage 1: State Bar Publication

Stage 2: CLE talk

Stage 3: Talking Head/Radio Interviews

Stage 4: Internet/Blog Presence

Law School Publicity

Stage 1: Admissions Brochure

Stage 2:  Quarterly Glossy Alumni Report

Stage 3: Multiple Targeted Glossies

Stage 4: State of the Art Web Site/Press Agents/PR Specialists

Posted in Random Jurisprudence, The BAT Cave | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Could the Gender Gap Save Affirmative Action?

Posted on March 9, 2012 by

Abigail Fisher sued the University of Texas, Austin, arguing that UT’s admissions policies violate the Equal Protection Clause of the XIVth Amendment. Abigail Fisher is white. UT automatically accepts Texas residents who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class, irrespective of race or ethnicity. After that, UT admits students relying on multiple factors, including race and ethnicity, to fill out the class. Fisher was not in the top 10%, so had to compete with everyone else (athletes, alumni kids, African Americans, Latinos, disabled students, etc.) to get a spot. She did not succeed, and matriculated at an institution in another state, from which she is about to graduate.   Fisher lost her case in the lower courts, and the Supreme Court has decided to review it next fall.

Fisher is arguing that UT’s policies exceed the narrow use of race and ethnicity to achieve a diverse educational environment that the Supreme Court approved in Grutter v. Bollinger. Fisher is also arguing that Grutter should be overturned.  Justice O’Connor, now retired, authored the 5-4 decision in Grutter.  She has been replaced by Justice Alito.    Three of the four dissenters (Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas) remain on the Court. One, Justice Rehnquist, has been replaced by Chief Justice Roberts. It is not hard to imagine five Justices voting to ban all use of race and ethnicity for all purposes in the admissions process.

What might persuade one or more of the five to pull up short from ending all forms affirmative action in higher education? In Grutter, the military and several business organizations submitted influential briefs supporting the benign use of race consciousness to build more diverse, responsive, and better work forces. Maybe what worked before will work again? I am not betting on it. Another possibility is that educational administrators will paint a vivid picture of the context-based nature of the admissions process, which (1) relies on race and ethnicity only as plus factors in a holistic evaluation of the candidate, and (2) does not place any greater weight on those plus factors than it does on others (e.g, class, alumni status, athleticism, etc.), and (3) evaluates how the applicant’s race and ethnicity has shaped her experience in such a way as to augment the educational environment. If educational institutions can get these points across clearly, then they can make the subsequent one, which is that banning all reference to race and ethnicity will essentially impose a form of censorship on admissions offices that applies only with respect to this one characteristic.  Admissions committees will be able to talk about everything except race and ethnicity that might have shaped an applicant’s experience, from the trivial (how the applicant was traumatized when she lost the fourth grade spelling bee) to the profound (how the applicant graduated from high-school despite taking care of her three younger siblings and working 20 hours/week.)  Sounds convincing to me.  But for the target audience, the odds seem even worse on this one.

photo courtesy of Getty Images

What about this? Within the last five or so years, girls have been surpassing boys in educational achievement.  The new pro-girl gender gap has caused some colleges to admit lower-achieving boys in the interest of “balancing” the class. If the Court bans all forms of affirmative action in University admissions, will their sons, grandsons, and nephews face the consequences? One way to keep affirmative action for boys, while still killing it for members of racial and ethnic minorities, would be to rely on the intermediate standard of review that applies to classifications based on gender. But is it possible that at least one Justice (ok, Kennedy), might have a twinge of conscious about this?  Can it really be alright to allow “balancing” for boys, who have not suffered systematic forms of exclusion, discrimination, or implicit bias, but to disallow a similar flexible admissions approach for racial and ethnic minorities? For some, the answer will be “oh, sure it is!” But maybe, just maybe, one fellow in DC will wonder… is this distinction defensible, can I stomach it?

 

Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments