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 law "schools"), first-year courses typically include two rather unhelpful kinds of evaluation: the "Socratic method" and final exams. The only other feedback involves professors walking too close to the speakers while mic’d up.

During the semester, we’re occasionally called on to answer questions about a case from the day's assigned reading. The amount of feedback here varies from professor to professor. At the lower end, you just learn whether they approve of your summary of the facts. At the slightly less low end, you may learn whether they approve of your interpretation of the broader case. In either instance, this feedback only pertains 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 use in determining how successfully they’ve been engaging the material on a broader, or deeper, level.

At the end of the semester, we dutifully take our exams. Here again, the feedback varies depending on the professor. I, for one, have never received a copy of my exam with comments. If that was an option, it wasn’t advertised. In most of my classes, the feedback from my professors consisted of a single 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. There's the possibility of visiting the professor to discuss your exam, but this also comes too late and the intervening passage of time likely dulls most substantive benefits it may offer.

In one of my classes, the professor sent out some strong student answers as examples. This is slightly more helpful than a single character-long evaluation, but as far as feedback goes it would still need some air quotes. Not only did it fail to address what I wrote, but simply publicizing a “strong” answer doesn’t address which points in that answer 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. Still, in hindsight I think I should have made (or start making) more of an effort to engage my professors in this context. At least, that is, with regards to those professors who seem to hold office hours voluntarily.

Chatting with classmates actually does tend to produce real feedback, but it comes with a few complications. It’s hard to know whether someone more or less in the same position as you are really knows what they’re talking about on any particular legal point. On the other hand, working through tough questions together is a good way to see the answer (or your proposed answer) from a different perspective. While talking with classmates is helpful, it’s not clear why I’m paying Columbia tens of thousands of dollars to get feedback from my friends.

Neither of these possibilities (attending office hours and working in groups) 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 cut off 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.

There's an ongoing discussion at TimelySubmissionOfGrades that relates to some of these points as well.

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.