Class Participation: How and Why?

I have been rethinking my approach to class participation, and invite your suggestions about how to grade that aspect of student performance, if at all.

Last semester, in Property I, I based 10% of the students' grades on class participation. They won points for class participation in a variety of ways, including serving on review teams, filling out short ungraded quizzes, and signing an "on deck" sheet for Socratic questioning. Despite those many inputs, I still ended up with a very tight cluster of scores, making it difficult to generate a curve that satisfied Chapman's somewhat challenging specs. (My other class, a Law & Economics seminar, raised similar problems.)

I've tried in the past scoring class participation on a more subjective basis, marking the seating chart immediately after class to indicate which students has won class participation points for contributing to discussion of the assigned materials. Although no student ever challenged that system for fairness, it admits the claim all too easily; I prefer more objective measures of performance. Also, I found that scoring students during or after each class, based on some rough measure of "added to class discussion," invited pestering along the lines of, "Did you count my performance, today, Professor Bell? I didn't see you mark the sheet, and you confess to being absent-minded." Fie on that.

I could give up entirely on grading class participation. I don't recall my profs at Chicago keeping track of student participation, after all, unless perhaps for casual dissection in the faculty lounge, and they taught very well. Perhaps I should just stick to exams, and run the risk of teaching to students unprepared for class and unrepentant about their ignorance.

I promised my students that, before I decided how to assess class participation in Property II, I would seek informed advice. If you have some to share, I would welcome hearing it, in the comments below or privately. Thank you.

Three Kinds of Diversity

Diversity comes in many flavors. I here compare three types—diversity of skin color and sex, cultural diversity, and ideological diversity—and offer some observations about the distinctive costs and benefits of each. I conclude that, holding all else equal, a group of people having diverse colors and sexes will enjoy modest institutional gains at low cost, while a group touting ideological diversity runs the risk of high transaction costs but wins a shot at great intellectual gains. Groups with high cultural diversity fall in between those two extremes.

Diversity of skin color and sex appears on the face of a group, thus offering ready proof that its selection, such as through hiring and promotion, was not tainted with invidious discrimination. Holding all else equal—assuming, specifically, that the racially and sexually diverse group does not possess above-average cultural and ideological diversity—the costs of intra-group transactions remain low. Thus, for instance, might a facially diverse group of culturally and ideologically similar people get along very smoothly. Think, here, of an elite law school where every professor has absorbed Ivy League norms and all lean moderately left. They might bicker, of course; law professors specialize in that. But such a culturally and ideologically uniform group is not likely to host nasty public fights about ballot initiatives or the like.

Are there downsides to pursuing diversity of skin color and sex in hiring and promotion? Not if you can find enough well-qualified candidates, and not if you avoid discriminating against candidates for blameless having an uninteresting color or sex. Happily, it is not too hard to satisfy both conditions, these days.

Cultural diversity proves harder to document, and runs some risk of increasing intra-group transaction costs. Someone brought up solely within the confines of respectable East Coast institutions will have to work a bit to understand a peer raised Mormon, in Utah's backcountry. So, too, might differences of sexual orientation (which like cultural differences generally do not appear on a person's face) sometimes lead to innocent misunderstandings. Holding equal for other sorts of diversity, however, cultural differences offer many charms and few serious costs. Most of us, and especially those of us in academia, enjoy meeting friendly people with exotic backgrounds. When we share ideologies, moreover, meeting fellow travelers who differ from us suggests that our most heartfelt values transcend race, sex, and culture—a comforting, if somewhat smug, idea.

Ideological diversity, standing alone, proves at least as hard to document as cultural diversity—it does not appear on a person's face nor even, typically, in a person's dress or hairstyle—and much more likely to raise intra-group transaction costs. Religious differences prove largely intractable, though in polite society we tend to keep them private. Political differences, at least in American institutions, threaten to burst out into loud and public disagreements, however. Such frank exchanges can help each side to hone its arguments, of course, and thus offers the prospect of considerable gains both to the disputants and the group that harbors them both. But if local norms do not temper the tone and proper boundaries of ideological debate, transactions costs can easily soar, making it hard for a group to manage even run-of-the-mill functions efficiently.

In sum: diversity of skin color and sex offers few costs and modest benefits; cultural diversity creates slightly higher transaction costs but compensates with intriguing charms; and ideological diversity presents a high risk/high return strategy for institutions devoted to generating new and useful ideas.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, and MoneyLaw.]

The Hand Rule

Judge Learned Hand famously opined that if the burdens of preventing an accident outweigh its cost multiplied by its probability, it does not constitute carelessness to avoid those burdens. Doesn't that little gem make you want to break out in song? I've got just the thing: The Hand Rule, a little ditty I recently composed and played for some students at Chapman Law School.

Though I've yet to record The Hand Rule, I can offer you a .pdf of the lyrics and chords as well as a PowerPoint, complete with pictures of Learned Hand, to accompany the performance (both uncopyrighted). Here's a sample of a verse and the refrain:

In the case of Carrol Towing Co., Learned Hand set forth to show
The meaning of "reasonability."

Defendant failed to leave in charge, a man to watch its unmoored barge.
And plaintiff's cargo met calamity.

"Negligence!" plaintiff complained and on appeal, Judge Hand explained,
The proper scope of liability.

Learned, learned, Learned. Learned in the law was he.
Learned Judge Hand, Learned, he judged so learnedly!
So learn what the Hand Rule teaches: "There's no liability,
If the burden of the cost exceeds the loss times the probability."

Silly? Yes, but it gets students to pay attention and remember what they learn. So goes the modus operandi of the Law and Fun school.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and MoneyLaw.]

What IS a good part-time program?

Over on my own blog, I've talked a bit about the new part-time program rankings that USNWR is proposing and the new part of this year's questionnaire that asks voters to name up to 15 "good" part-time programs (see here). Setting aside the misnomer--most of the students in the part-time programs work about full-and-a-half-time, between their "day jobs" and studying for law schools--I have to wonder what constitutes a "good" part-time program.

Is it the availability of good teachers for the program? A good selection of classes? Mentoring for the part-time students? The ability to provide the students with some semblance of the extracurricular activities that the full-time students experience? How well the graduates perform? Whether enough of the graduates get plum jobs after graduation?

This question is timely for two reasons: because it's the right question for educational reasons and because other USNWR voters are filling out their ballots now. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Want Your School to Rise in the Rankings? A Best Practices Survey For Law Schools

You might not want your school to rise, I don't know. But if you do, you might encourage your dean or associate dean to fill out this survey on your school's use of best practices in legal education, which along with information on bar passage rates relative to entering credentials, and student satisfaction, will be used to compile a list of law schools that provide exceptional "value added" for students.

Who's doing this? A couple of Moneyball-oriented law professors -- myself and Dave Fagundes of Southwestern Law -- with a dream: of law schools competing on educational quality, and a Race To The Top that improves legal education across the board. We're joined by a terrific Advisory Board, still in formation, that includes fomer deans like Daniel Rodriguez, former San Diego dean now at Texas, and fellow MoneyLaw blogger Nancy Rapoport, former dean at Houston and Nebraska/now at UNLV, as well as leading scholars on legal education and other topics like Susan Sturm (Columbia) and Bill Henderson (Indiana).

After compiling the list of "value-added" schools, we're going to deliver the information to U.S. News survey respondents, and encourage them to use it in filling out the survey in November. One possibility is that the value-added data will show that certain schools that have not historically received high ratings ought to receive a "4" or "5" from both law professors and lawyers. Given the current lack of information about the relative quality of law schools, and the weight given to the survey responses in U.S. News's methodology (40%) we believe that this additional information will have a significant — and positive — effect on the U.S. News rankings for those schools that we highlight.

Are you a dean, associate dean for academic affairs, chair of the hiring committee, most recently tenured professor, law firm hiring partner, state AG, or federal or state judge? That's who gets the U.S. News survey, and you can sign up for our Voter's Guide in a second at our new website, designed by UGA 2L Jerad Davis. We'll email it to you in November when the USN survey comes out, and if you have other ideas as to how we can help you do the survey, please let us know. For example, we may put on our website a spreadsheet where you can sort the schools by region to compare within the relevant markets.

Even if you're not one of the USN voters listed above, maybe you know one, and suspect they may not be a regular MoneyLaw reader — please, forward them this link to our site, and encourage them to sign up! Future law students will thank you, and so will we.

MoneyLaw readers might recall my blogging over the summer on this idea of value-added assessment, and now we're trying to make it a reality. It's a distinctively Moneyball concept — using performance, not pedigree, in assessing law schools — and we owe some serious thanks to Jim Chen for launching this blog in the first place, and then for hosting us here. Other godparents of the project include, of course, Paul Caron and Rafael Gely, whose classic article applying Moneyball principles to legal education got many of us thinking in this direction.

We hope you'll join the continued discussion about how best to assess relative educational quality, and specifically which schools ought to be rated particularly high or low — and encourage law professors and lawyers to use this kind of approach in doing the survey. Welcome your ideas.

Cross-posted at Prawfsblawg and Race to the Top