Sloppy exam setting ignites the ire of Legal Process students
By the Numbers
$276,742: Professor Yoon’s 2017 salary
$206,933: Then-Associate Dean Rittich’s 2017 salary
127: Students in Prof. Yoon’s Legal Process classes last year
Last fall, there was a buzz around Legal Process. It is not that students were dying to discuss res judicata, but many upper-year mentors thought it prudent to warn 1Ls about one of the instructors. Congenial and equipped with slick PowerPoint decks, Professor Albert Yoon’s weaknesses came to light at exam time, when, year after year, students faced error-riddled fact patterns. Exams even included challenge sheets for students to flag questions so poorly written they were incomprehensible.
This past April, “the exam was a disaster,” says Adelheid*, a 2L who was in Prof. Yoon’s Legal Process class. Most egregiously, one of the short answer questions was copied and pasted from the 2017 exam, and therefore referenced parties never mentioned in the fact pattern.
Though Adelheid had looked at that 2017 exam while studying, she wanted to ensure she wasn’t missing anything and spent valuable time re-reading the fact pattern and trying to find the missing party. “In the end, I barely had enough time to finish,” she says.
Another essay question misidentified key parties, which caused significant confusion. “I originally wrote one of the answers addressing the question I thought was being asked. Only towards the end did I realize [Prof. Yoon] wrote the question about a different party,” says Horatius*, another 2L affected by the exam. “So I had to delete an answer that made a lot more sense to fit into his questions that turned out to be a mistake. … It messed with the time management of everything.”
Unsatisfactory solutions
Many students wrote to the administration with their concerns about the exam. Eleven days afterwards, Prof. Yoon emailed all his students, apologizing “both for the errors and for any anxiety they have produced.” He and then-Associate Dean Kerry Rittich decided it would be “equitable and fair” to compare exam answers based on the inferences students drew, according to the email. That is, there were multiple curves, with students only being compared to their peers who had made the same assumption.
“I don’t think there was any good way to deal with [grading the exam], except possibly to eliminate the curve,” says Ermengarde*, another 2L who was in Prof. Yoon’s Legal Process class. “While deference was given to some of the various possible interpretations of the errors in the exam, no thought was given to the sheer amount of time it took to divine Yoon’s intent.”
“What I thought would be an appropriate solution was counting your three best answers, and your fourth [would be] discarded,” Horatius says. “I think that would account for the time management problem that came out of having to adjust for the mistake in the question.”
Horatius met with Prof. Yoon after grades were released. Nothing came of that meeting, or from his formal appeal.
Prof. Yoon declined to speak with Ultra Vires. “Everything I have to say on the subject I communicated to my students,” he wrote in an email.
“It’s a law school, for crying out loud”
The Faculty of Law currently lacks any policy regarding how instructors write—and proofread—their exams, Ultra Vires learned from an Access to Information request.
Prof. Andrew Green, Associate Dean of Students, admits errors in exam setting have become an issue, though he isn’t sure why the Faculty doesn’t have a policy on exam setting. “I think it’s basically that we relied on people to proofread their own papers, and maybe there are better practices out there that we need to look at,” he says. “It’s reasonable for me to think about the best way to go forward, to put in place guidelines, to ensure we minimize mistakes going forward.”
Ermengarde is all for a proofreading policy. “I can think of no other highly paid job where there is absolutely no quality control,” she says. “To receive more than a quarter of a million dollars each year, and to be expected to produce a reasonable, well-edited, five- or six-page exam is hardly taxing. If confidentiality is an issue, the Faculty could require paid proofreaders to take an oath or sign something. It’s a law school, for crying out loud.”
But there are downsides to implementing a formal exam-setting policy, says Prof. Mohammad Fadel, who will be teaching one section of Legal Process this coming winter. He argues it will only add busy work, and, since professors are internally motivated, won’t result in better exam questions. “[It will] just add a whole other set of steps to do, boxes to check off, records you have to keep. It’ll introduce a whole other layer of supervision,” he says. “I’m self-motivated to write a good exam for students, and I’m sure that’s the same for all my colleagues.”
Prof. Fadel, who stressed he was unfamiliar with the complaints around Prof. Yoon’s 2018 exam, starts writing exam fact patterns about two weeks before they’re due, and estimates it takes him a day to write each one. He begins by reading recent cases about the law he wants to ask about, modifies them and then sends a draft to his assistant to check.
“She reads it very carefully and she proofreads for grammar, names and stuff like that,” he says. “She’ll say this doesn’t seem to make sense, at least from a story perspective. And so I’ll go back and double check I didn’t make a mistake.”
Further, Prof. Fadel argues that such mistakes on exam questions can actually help students in the long run. “I don’t want to sound like I’m preaching tough love here, but resilience is a skill that will take you very far in life and in your career. If you’re thrown a curveball, you need to be ready for it… It’s all about tomorrow.”
For his part, Horatius recognizes it would be difficult to force proofreaders on every professor. But “when, for three consecutive years, you’re having swarms of students complain about the same professor’s exam, then maybe you should put that under closer watch,” he says.
Raising hackles
The Faculty’s wait-and-see approach on addressing exam-setting errors isn’t enough for many, especially since the 2018 Legal Process exam wasn’t the first time students have pointed out significant errors on finals. “I would also like to have seen the Faculty respond by taking the competency concerns of the students seriously,” says Ermengarde. “We pay a punishing amount of tuition, and professors are rewarded handsomely for their service. At the very least, this should give the students the right to some transparency in the issue of professorial standards.”
(On that note, when Ultra Vires first asked how the Faculty will try and prevent exam-setting errors, Assistant Dean Sara Faherty declined to share any information, citing privacy concerns around human resources decisions. This inspired our Access to Information request.)
On September 5, the law school community received an email from Dean Edward Iacobucci announcing Prof. Yoon’s new role as Associate Dean of Curriculum and Research, focused on faculty research and, ironically, building the J.D. curriculum.
Based on past Sunshine List results, this change in position would not necessarily result in Prof. Yoon receiving a higher salary. Nevertheless, the perceived promotion after years of subpar exam-setting is sticking in the craw of some students, though they admit other instructors for Legal Process will likely benefit the student body.
“I just wanted some disciplinary action against him,” says Adelheid, adding she wasn’t concerned about raising her grade. She simply sought “some sort of remedy that shows the school is with us, not protecting him for his stupid mistakes.”
*Names have been changed.
