Legal Commentary

I'm delighted to be back for another stint blogging.  I'm a little slow off the mark this month, due in part to participating in Prawfs! 5 at FSU last week (though it hasn't stopped Paul and Rob, two of my fellow participants).  But I've also been writing -- OK, rewriting and worrying about -- my final exam.  As much as we dislike the fact, testing and grading are two of the most important things we do; they matter enormously for our students, and for that reason we need to get them as right as we can.  Hence, at least for me, the constant fine-tuning (to put an optimistic spin on it).

So here's my question, for current and former students: what did you hate most about a final exam you had in law school?  (For profs, what's the biggest mistake you have made in writing an exam?)  I'd love to hear comments more specific than "the exam was too long" or "it didn't test on what the the professor stressed in class," though precise examples of those faults are welcome, too.  Sloppy drafting?  Unreasonable expectations?  Politically-biased questions?  Distracting fact patterns?  I know some of this has been aired with a few recent posts about particular exam-writing and grading issues, but I'd like to throw the topic open for a more general discussion, especially since exams are presumably on everyone's minds now.  It may be too late for comments to affect how exams are written this time around, but maybe something will stick when we sit down in November and draft our next round.