Feedback

-- By MarcLegrand - 16 May 2012

Introduction

“Professor Moglen, I’d like to keep working on this based on your comments.” This sentiment ends many of my classmates’ papers. It begins mine, since the issue of feedback is at the front of my thoughts after two weeks of cramming for exams.

The Way Things Are

In my experience (which has been echoed by classmates in other sections and even at other schools), first-year courses typically include two rather unhelpful kinds of evaluation: question-and-answer instruction and final exams. The only other feedback I’ve encountered in a “substantive” class happened when my professor walked too close to the speakers while mic’d up.

During the semester, we’re called on occasionally to answer questions about a case from the assigned reading. The amount of feedback here varies from professor to professor; sometimes you learn whether they approve of your interpretation of the case, and sometimes you just learn whether they approve of your summary of the facts. Regardless, this feedback only relates to a few minutes (or seconds) of on-the-spot student commentary about a single case. It doesn’t strike me as a very useful tool for students to determine how successfully they’ve been engaging the material on a broader level.

At the end of the semester, we dutifully take our exams. Here also, the feedback varies depending on professor. I, for one, have never received a copy of my exam with comments. If that was an option, it wasn’t advertised. In two of my classes last semester, the feedback from my professors consisted of a letter on lawnet. It’s as if a novice pilot was sent on a mission to bomb a munitions factory and upon return his commanders told him he hit “pretty close to the target.” This information doesn’t tell him what went wrong, comes too late to affect the mission, and doesn’t even help him prepare for the next assignment.

In my third class, the professor sent out some strong student answers as examples. This is slightly more helpful than a single character evaluation, but as far as feedback goes it would still need some air quotes. Not only does it fail to address what I wrote, but simply publicizing a “strong” answer doesn’t address which points in it were more compelling and which might have been flat-out wrong.

I borrow obscene sums to attend Columbia Law School. The name implies the money is paying for instruction, but too often it feels like I’m paying $55,000 a year for the privilege of being judged against my classmates based on four hours of writing. What can we do to get more out of our time in the classroom here?

What Can We Do?

Each of my professors, whether by choice or not, has held regular office hours. Taking advantage of these can certainly help clear up confusion, but I’m not sure the opportunity to have specific questions answered constitutes feedback in a meaningful sense of the word.

Chatting with classmates actually does tend to produce real feedback, but with a few complications. It’s hard to know whether someone more or less in the same position as you really knows what they’re talking about on any particular legal point. Also, it’s not clear why I’m paying Columbia tens of thousands of dollars to get feedback from my friends.

Neither of these tactics addresses the basic problem: most professors, for one reason or another, don’t structure their classes in a way that prioritizes feedback. In this class, dialogues (and here I mean actual dialogues, not two-person monologues as in the “Socratic” method) were rarely executed before their time; the priority was on engagement, rather than on strict adherence to a syllabus. Exorcising the exam and adding several writing assignments meant that we received direct feedback on work that we had a chance to plan out, write, and revisit over a course of days, not hours. Unfortunately, the default scheme of first-year law classes does not follow these lines.

I’m not sure what we, as students, can do to change the system. As consumers of what is ultimately a $170,000 good, one would think we’d have some sway with the producers. At the same time, it often seems in law school that things are the way they are simply because that’s the way they were. In an institution that appears so resistant to change, it’s hard to see how the fundamental structure (3.5 months of lecture + 4 hours of exam) can be changed.

Hopefully it’s clear from my writing that I’d like to continue engaging on this topic. I’m not pleased with the defeatist ending, but I do feel pretty powerless. I’m going to be revisiting and editing this over the next few days.