Sophie Sparrow (New Hampshire), Describing the Ball: Improve Teaching by Using Rubrics – Explicit Grading Criteria, 2004 Mich. St. L. Rev. 1 (2004).
This posting reaches back in time for an old favorite: Describing the Ball by Sophie Sparrow of the University of New Hampshire School of Law. It is worth the read or re-read.
Introduction
. . . Law professors and students complain about grading’ and have been doing so for decades. At the same time, lawyers, judges and law professors complain about legal education in general, and law school grading systems in particular. Grading systems have been specifically criticized for relying on one end of the semester exam, contributing to student stress and reducing student motivation. Grading and graders are faulted for being arbitrary, inconsistent and promoting an unfair ranking system.” Fortunately, over the past ten years, many resources have been developed to help law professors improve their teaching, including books, articles, videos and conferences.
However, even with these tools, and with professors trying a variety of teaching methods, many law professors are regularly disappointed with student performance. Moreover, despite its problems, grading -assigning letter grades to summarize students’ performance—is unlikely to disappear.
This is appropriate. Law schools should continue to evaluate students, but : they should also conduct formative assessments.
These assessments are defined as “ongoing assessments designed to make students’ thinking visible to both teachers and students,” not assessments that merely provide numbers and letters that give students very little guidance.
Acknowledging that law schools will probably continue to grade students, however, does not necessarily signal defeat. Instead, we can tackle some of the problems related to grading by improving our grading practices.” By being more explicit about how we grade, and refining our grading process, we can use grades as a tool to improve our students’ learning. In addition, refining and analyzing grading systems can help us professionally and institutionally. With improved grading practices we can evaluate students more effectively and efficiently. We can better plan individual courses and the law school curriculum. The advantage of revising the grading process is that schools would not have to create something new; instead, we improve a procedure already prominent in legal education. . . .
We can improve law school grading by following approaches used by educators in other disciplines.” These teachers have noted that students lear more effectively when their teachers provide them with the criteria by which they are evaluated.’ One way to do this is to provide students with rubrics, or detailed written grading criteria, which describe both what students should learn and how they will be evaluated.
Certainly rubrics are not the only solution to solving the problems with grading in law schools, and they have flaws. But the benefit of using rubrics do, I believe, outweigh their deficiencies.
Rubrics are already used by those teaching students from kindergarten to graduate school; law school professors can benefit, as other teachers have, from the abundant research in the science of learning, and thereby help law students leam more effectively. Grading law students may never be easy, but it may serve as a learning tool that benefits professors and students alike. . . .
