The worst kind of test
I just got done with my Financial Accounting midterm. What an absolutely miserable experience, and how foolish I am for ever signing up in the first place.
First of all, it was a Scantron, multiple-choice test. How retarded is that? I haven't taken a multiple choice test since probably my sophomore year of college. Second, it was closed book. Call us law students spoiled, but we don't do closed book tests (this is, in fact, my first closed book test in all of law school).
The reason is simple. The point of law school is not to become an expert on some topic so that you can mindless spit up the knowledge you memorized on a test. It's impossible to become an expert on any area of law in one semester, and even if you did, the law is constantly changing. Instead, the classes are supposed to provide you with a background of the key concepts of the area of law, along with ways of thinking about problems in that field. fn1.
Consequently, there is no point in having a closed-book test where the goal is to memorize everything. If you need to refresh your memory on some specific point, it's similar to what you'll do throughout your legal career: Look it up. Besides, the theory is that law school exams are so demanding that you better have a pretty good grasp on all the material going in, because you'll never have time to look it up during the exam. fn2.
For a class in financial accounting, there is even less reason to have the exam be closed-book. The goal of the class is not to make us accountants. No one expects that we could audit a company at the end of the semester. We're learning about how accounting works so we can more effectively analyze deals we encounter. This means that we need to understand big-picture points, not minutiae.
Of course, the most minute details were what the professor decided to test. It wasn't just that we needed to have learned the basic overview information. He was asking about tiny details that were throw-away points barely mentioned in class or in the materials. One question referred specifically to a one-page reading assignment in the coursepack.
So it was the worst kind of test. No sense of scale or focus on the most important points. Oh, and did I mention that it was multiple choice?
fn1 - Whether law school actually does this effectively is another question.
fn2 - I haven't necessarily found this to be true, but whatever.
First of all, it was a Scantron, multiple-choice test. How retarded is that? I haven't taken a multiple choice test since probably my sophomore year of college. Second, it was closed book. Call us law students spoiled, but we don't do closed book tests (this is, in fact, my first closed book test in all of law school).
The reason is simple. The point of law school is not to become an expert on some topic so that you can mindless spit up the knowledge you memorized on a test. It's impossible to become an expert on any area of law in one semester, and even if you did, the law is constantly changing. Instead, the classes are supposed to provide you with a background of the key concepts of the area of law, along with ways of thinking about problems in that field. fn1.
Consequently, there is no point in having a closed-book test where the goal is to memorize everything. If you need to refresh your memory on some specific point, it's similar to what you'll do throughout your legal career: Look it up. Besides, the theory is that law school exams are so demanding that you better have a pretty good grasp on all the material going in, because you'll never have time to look it up during the exam. fn2.
For a class in financial accounting, there is even less reason to have the exam be closed-book. The goal of the class is not to make us accountants. No one expects that we could audit a company at the end of the semester. We're learning about how accounting works so we can more effectively analyze deals we encounter. This means that we need to understand big-picture points, not minutiae.
Of course, the most minute details were what the professor decided to test. It wasn't just that we needed to have learned the basic overview information. He was asking about tiny details that were throw-away points barely mentioned in class or in the materials. One question referred specifically to a one-page reading assignment in the coursepack.
So it was the worst kind of test. No sense of scale or focus on the most important points. Oh, and did I mention that it was multiple choice?
fn1 - Whether law school actually does this effectively is another question.
fn2 - I haven't necessarily found this to be true, but whatever.
posted by N at 8:13 PM
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