19 Dec, 2006
Exams with questions that were not covered in class/reading
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Pre-Law Discussions, Exam Advice 
I've been away concentrating on finals the past week or so. As I
finished my last final this semester, I finally came to terms with this fact: Some law school exams consist of topics that you do
not go over in class.
In your first year you don't know this and it causes panic after the exam. You come to believe that you missed these topics in class or in the reading.
But now I am
sure that sometimes exams simply test knowledge that was outside the
scope of both class and assigned reading.
The class of which I speak had very little substance to it. It ended two weeks early and I (being a law student who tends to make outlines too lengthy) could only get about 25 pages for a class outline even with the help of a 2002 outline that was basically a word-for-word account of the lectures which had remained unchanged since that time. Additionally, the only reading in this class was four short cases.
But still, topics
on the test that were outside of the scope of what we talked about
in class. And this test being multiple choice means it is even more of a crapshoot.
So why am I comfortable with this? Because everyone else is in the
same boat (and because this professor seems to curve the grades as upward as allowable under our school's policy). There were no old exams to go over (likely because the professor uses the same questions each year as evidenced by example years in questions being all in the 1990's) so there was no way for anyone to guess what to study besides the outline and the readings. So I don't know what else I could have done.
As far as why some professors do this, I do not know. And I'm not saying this is that common or as pronounced as I feel it was in this class. But just know that sometimes you are going to encounter things on the test that were not directly covered in class or in assigned readings.
This point raised an interesting issue involving professors who test students on topics that were not taught.
There is one major problem with in-class exams that test knowledge outside what was taught in the classroom: students who happen to have this outside knowledge from their personal backgrounds are rewarded, and students without it receive lower grades, despite the fact that both students may have studied the same.
In other words, testing on subjects not taught to students has the result of randomly awarding points to students who happen to have familiarity with the outside knowledge. That isn't fair to the other students. And that isn't the purpose for exams. Exams should reward students who best understand and apply what they were taught in the class. If a professor wants to test on other subjects, the professor should include those subjects in the teaching materials.
To randomly award points to students with outside knowledge arbitrarily elevates that student to the detriment of all other students. I can see no justifiable reason for arbitrarily increasing some students' grades over others.
Posted by Editor of TopLawStudent.com 31 Dec 2006, 01:25