Hi Christine,
The other thing is that if you type with both hands, so you will use both your brains. Left hand, right brain and right hand, left brain.

Hope you scored well.

Cheers,
IP Dragon

I preferred to handwrite my exams b/c I simply didn't want to lug my computer into the school (your visiting school, in fact), worry about having to put whatever software was required to be used on the computer, worry about my spelling and correcting that, and then also worry whether my computer would crash.

That was some time ago (1997-2000), though, and maybe I would change my mind now with the enhancements to software/hardware etc. Given that my handwriting is somewhat atrocious, I'm sure my professors would have appreciated it!

Christine,

Wisconsin is just transitioning to computer exams, too, and my Contracts class was one of the experimental groups. I told my students to take the exam in whatever format they felt most comfortable. I don't mind reading most hand-written exams, and I don't think that having a higher quantity of words is a virtue in exam answers, so I do not expect typing to be an advantage. But I do believe that forcing students to write is a disadvantage to many.

I'm confused. How could you tell that a student was offline for four minutes?

Hi Christine,

I admit that my research on the LSAT and law school exams has made a student of how law schools test students. Here is a format I have been experimenting with, and getting some good results.

For the past three years, I have given 8 hour take-home essay exams with a word limit (usually 2,750). The exams must be typewritten, double-spaced, 12-point font. 2,750 is typically less words than a student expends in a 3-hour Bluebook exam. Obviously, as a take-home, the exams are open book.

Aside from ease of grading when the prose is legible and coherent (a by-product of giving more time), my experience has yielded some interesting statistics: final exam grades (which are blindgraded) are typically correlated with attendance in the vicinity of .35; final exam grades are always positively correlated with grades from other class assignments; when attendance is combined with class assignments, the correlation with final exams has been as high as .70--a statistic I would not expect to see if there was significant cheating. (For cheating to work, at least one cheater needs to know something; and if they do, why cheat with someone who slacked off all semester?)

In general, I agree with Gordon that many longwinded answers go nowhere. But overall, I have found that total word count is strongly correlated with final exam grades (almost always > .40). The best exams are usually within 1 or 2 words of the limit. I can just imagine students whittling down their answers and cutting out excess words to meet the word limit, not unlike the word limits imposed by courts.

I have used the above format primarily because I think it is more analogous to the working conditions of practicing lawyers: relatively high pressure (8 hours goes fast) but with time to edit and reference relevant materials (usually an outline). And it shows up in the quality of analysis and exposition. Most the exams seem like they were written by capable, intelligent lawyers. The fact that the answers are in a format that is easier to grade is a bonus.

FXKLM -- the exam that is printed for me has a log sheet on the back with the time that the student logged into the secure exam system and the time logged off. The log will also note if the user had to reboot (there's a reboot password or something). I wouldn't have even looked for that info if a student had not typed into the exam a sentence to the effect "My computer froze up. . . ."
Bill -- I think Eric Goldman here has used a similar take home system and liked it. I did not actually do any calculations while graded, but I did not that length does not seem to be any sort of indicator of quality!

Bill,

The word count has a different meaning if you have a take-home exam with a word limit. I would expect the best answers to approach the limit. With a three-hour, spill-your-guts format, long answers usually correlate pretty highly to someone transferring their outline to the blue books. In this context, my experience has been that exam answers of middling length are the best. (The shortest answers often are from people who don't have much to say. Perhaps graduating third years or less capable students.)

I like take-home exams, by the way, and I have used them often. Actually, I would prefer research papers if I could demand them in every class.

This is, of course, purely anecdotal but I don't know any student in my year who wrote exams who is near the top of our class. I suppose the correlation depends on what type of exam is given, but the ones we get in-class tend to be of the 3 hour, multiple question, no way you could possibly completely answer the questions in 3 hour variety. Obviously pure length isn't going to get you a good grade; however, I do not see how "similarly situatated" students who handwrite their exam can possibly do as well as those students who type their exams. The computer users simply can answer more of the questions. Further, computer users have the luxury of more time to plan their answers. The gap between how many words a person can type and a person can handwrite is huge.

I think most students -- whether coming to law school straight from college, or coming from a few years in the working world -- have spent the last several years typing and NOT writing. Speaking for myself, my handwriting is fine and legible, but my hand would undoubtedly give out on me before the end of a three hour exam.

So the "typing" part is a HUGE pro; the big con is the "exam software" part. First, most of the offerings out there are just bad applications that do funky things to computers and cause huge problems and lots of crashes. Second, the entire concept of computer lock-down is incompatible with the professional standards we'll be expected to adhere to once we are in practice—after all, there will be no exam software keeping us from "cheating" when we are lawyers. (I'll also note that Mac users usually can't use their computers for exams that require exam software because most exam software is Windows only. That's a personal annoyance for me.)

Luckily, my school's exams are governed by an honor code, and I can happily type my exams on my Powerbook in Word. If that weren't the case, though, I might have chosen to handwrite exams rather than put up with buggy software and/or a borrowed computer.

Christine,

I teach at the University of La Verne College of Law in southern Cal. (We are up for ABA this year) We have been giving students the computer option for a long time. About 1/2 of my students type. Though I have done no rigorous studies, it doesn't seem to affect grades. I get a good spread of grades in each format. It seems that students who do not use notebooks in class also do not type exams, though, again, I have done no rigorous empircal analysis of this point. I also note no difference in length of exams based on typing versus writing. Next semester I may survey the class (I teach a 2 sections of Bus Orgs, amounting to about 70 students total), to see what sorts of answers I get. Oh well, back to grading!

Regards, John Linarelli