Everyone knew about the Harvard professor who lied in his own exam instructions. The guy set a word limit of 3000 on an exam to be taken at home over 24 hours. Then he gave the only A in the class to someone who’d written 5000 words. On the course website he explained that the essay was so good, so comprehensive, that it didn’t seem fair to penalize it for the technicality of running over.
Of course law school exams were about quantity, not quality. After all, you had one essay to prove that you studied like a dog for four months.
Two of my exams were eight hours long and word-limited. My friends and I argued a lot over whether the word limits were for real or just tricks like that Harvard prof’s exam. We concluded that Feldstein was sincere about the word limit. He probably set it low for the straightforward reason that he didn’t like reading exams. If he gave A’s to longer ones, word would leak out and next semester he’d end up with a thousand pages to grade. As for crim, that prof seemed less rational. But I wouldn’t reach the word limit anyway. I hadn’t touched the book or taken a note since early March.
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The first exam of spring was admin. I don’t really know what admin was about, except that the prof drew a confusing chart for us on the second day of the semester. It compared different theories to each other, most of which were normative (how judges should make decisions) but one of which was descriptive (how judges actually make decisions). The descriptive theory and all the little boxes under it hung on the blackboard like gristle. I hated the prof for confusing me, I hated myself for being confused on day 2, and I hated admin.
Six months later I took a legal philosophy course and found out that she’d messed up the chart (she wrote “Legal Realism” where she should’ve written “pragmatism,” the thing that was practiced by Legal Realists). By then I’d drawn up a superior confusing chart (“if this legal theory were an animal, which would it be?”) and happily posted a B-minus in admin.
