"And for those of you who've been emailing me asking me why I didn't do more with the Screwtape Letters, more like Gatsby..."

"... my answer to that is that the lack of interest in the question asked in this post shows why that project doesn't fly. The Gatsby project flew. It turned on minds that accepted the turn-on and took off."

The last line of my comment explaining why I have yet to fulfill what may seem to be a promise to complete an assignment I really only gave myself.

And this post gets not only a Gatsby project tag, but also a written strangely early in the morning tag.

It's okay if you don't volunteer to sit for my outside-of-law-school exams. I have plenty of exams written by nonvolunteers that I am duty-bound to read. This post is about a duty I felt I had to write the answer to my own exam, which I only gave because I wanted to write that answer. But if the question inspired no one else, then I tend to think that my answer would only have seemed weird or annoying or — the worst — unreadable.

Or is that the worst? The devil nags me to ask. The devil says: Wouldn't it be a fascinating new project to write a blog called "Unreadable Things"?

"Are the questions too hard? Are they too easy? Did I make all the studying worthwhile for them?"

The professor too is nervous about the exam.

On multiple choice exams:

“I have to make sure that the wrong answers are wrong in interesting ways, not in ‘duh’ ways... And that the right ones are really right.”

Are you keeping your leaves and, if so, have you shifted into bullying your neighbors who still put their leaves out to the curb for pickup?

We keep our leaves (and even take in some neighbors' leaves), and Meade has a composting process that takes a form I like to call an art installation. I've shown photographs of the various stages. Here's how it looked 9 days ago:



Anyway, we don't go around shaming the neighbors who dump their leaves at the curb for city pickup, which costs tax money and involves a lot of truck driving that's harmful to the environment, although if they read my blog they might feel a little bad about it.

But this NYT article — "Rake the Leaves? Some Towns Say Mow Them" — ends with an anecdote about a lady who's gone into shaming mode:

In northern Westchester, Fiona Mitchell of Bedford is a mulching convert... And she has become something of a proselytizer for the practice among her neighbors and those in other towns.

“I’m afraid I’m becoming a bit of a mulching police,” she said. “My friends call out, ‘I’m mulching, I’m mulching,’ when I walk by their houses.”

The boldfacing is mine, to explain the tag I'm putting on this post: religion substitutes. That's a tag that frequently goes along with another one of my tags: environmentalism. I once wrote an exam for my Religion and the Constitution class that had a school district arguably violating the Establishment Clause with its environmentalism rituals and recitations.

What are law students doing to protect themselves from the horror of a law school exam that lawprofs could easily write following the advice I am giving in this post?

Do law professors realize how much law students are relying on Wikipedia for summaries and insights into the cases we are assigning? In the old days, students spent a lot of money on commercial outlines, stuff like this. I've never looked at any of those books, not as a student and not as a teacher, though over the years, I've had many students ask me to recommend one.

Back when I was a law student — I graduated in 1981 — you wouldn't want the professor to know you were the sort of person who'd need or want to use a study guide, so it always surprised me that students would ask me, and I had no answer to the question other than to be careful: These things can be out of date, they may contain errors, and you can be wasting time on a lot of detail that I am not including and missing things that I will develop in class.

The best view of what will be on the exam is what we're talking about in class, which is based on the assigned readings, so why would you put time into reading some questionable alternative material instead of reading the casebook, taking notes on that book, paying attention in class, and condensing your reading and class notes into an outline that forces you to understand precisely those things that the exam will be about?

These days, from what I've heard, students have shifted to Wikipedia, which has lots of great entries for the cases that we read.

I love Wikipedia. I think it is one of the greatest things that has happened in the history of mankind. But you've got to know what it is and what it is not. Who is writing and tweaking those articles on important Supreme Court cases? They're quite well done, but that means they are done by lawyers, law students, and law academics. These contributors offset each other and enforce Wikipedia norms of neutrality, but, of course, law folk are expert at embedding political and policy preferences in seemingly neutral material. (That's what makes the cases so hard to read and understand.)

The first time a student in my class referred openly to Wikipedia, he quoted something that was a bit off. Perhaps it described a state constitutional law provision as banning racial discrimination when what it banned was using race as factor in affirmative action. It was something that needed better editing in Wikipedia.

It immediately occurred to me that a very efficient way to write an exam in this course would be to quote the Wikipedia entry on various cases and, for each, ask whether it is inaccurate. One could pick 10 statements about 10 cases — or 20 statements about 20 case — and ask the student to pick the 3 — or 5 or 6 — that you believe to be most inaccurate and explain why.

It's fine to use Wikipedia. I love it. But you've got to know what you are dealing with.

Milwaukee Public Schools get rid of letter grades and stop giving credit for good behavior, extra assignments, and handing things in on time.

One parent says "I think (district administrators) want letter grades to go away because they want to blur the line of failing students," but:

Administrators say the changes capture a more nuanced picture of a student's academic progress.

Nuance!

According to MPS, the updated report card identifies the skills students need to master in each grade level, and replaces overall letter grades with an AD for advanced, PR for proficient, BA for basic and MI for minimal. Proficient is the level expected for a student's grade level....

"The concept behind this is that we really want the grade to reflect the academic performance of the student vs. whether the student brought the assignment, did extra credit or talked in class," said Dave Dentinger, supervisor of secondary education in the Wauwatosa School District.

Last year, Wauwatosa started allowing students multiple chances to turn in an assignment and get it right. They cannot receive zeros on assignments. Homework is now worth only 10% of an overall grade, and extra credit is no longer accepted.

Peering through the nuance/blurred lines, I suspect that this is an effort to help boys. Who was getting hurt by all the emphasis on completing homework assignments? Who, by contrast, was bolstered by all the credit for compliant paperwork?

Oak Creek High School teacher Chris Kurth remembers that last year, when the district encouraged teachers to grade solely on academic performance and not behavior, a lot of questions came from high-performing students. They were sensitive to how the changes could affect their grade-point averages.

In what sense were they "high-performing" if they couldn't do well on the tests? They were "high-performing" in the game of playing to the teacher?

Some parents — and students — appreciate the rewards that grades have long offered to students who continually turn in complete assignments on time, and who speak up in class, as those behaviors are also likely to propel them in high school and, eventually, college or beyond.

Reading between those lines, I suspect that the credit-giving business had been perverted into an enterprise of teaching compliance and tolerance for boredom and constraint.

The real issue here isn't eliminating grades — because they're just shifting from the old-fashioned letters to "advanced," "proficient," "basic" and "minimal" — it's what grades are given for.

"An improved SAT will strongly focus on the core knowledge and skills that evidence shows are most important to prepare students for the rigors of college and career."

Oh, really? 

And what will that be — writing godawful sentences like that one?

These powerful experts attempt to explain their new project. Can you understand what they are talking about? They claim they have "three broad objectives":

• Increase the value of the SAT to students by focusing on a core set of knowledge and skills that are essential to college and career success; reinforcing the practice of enriching and valuable schoolwork; fostering greater opportunities for students to make successful transitions into postsecondary education; and ensuring equity and fairness.

• Increase the value of the SAT to higher education professionals by ensuring that the SAT meets the evolving needs of admission officers, faculty, and other administrators, and that the SAT remains a valid and reliable predictor of college success.

• Increase the value of the SAT to K–12 educators, administrators and counselors by strengthening the alignment of the SAT to college and career readiness; ensuring that the content reflects excellence in classroom instruction; and developing companion tools that allow educators to use SAT results to improve curriculum and instruction.

So... there are 3 ways you plan to increase the value of the SAT... but what the hell are they? The only difference I see in the 3 ways seems to be the 3 different groups who are assessing value (students, higher education professionals, and K-12 people). But what exactly are you changing? Bizarrely bad communication from the people who test the communication skills of the young. Detestable!

At the Cabin-Fever Café...

... we finally got the snow that reopened the ski trails, but it's 4.6 °F — "Feels Like -11 °F" — here in Madison, and that's beyond the point where you can say to yourself be tough, be strong. Not for mere recreation or the general principle of getting out of the house.

Within this shut-in-ism, let me offer another exam in my capacity as Freewheeling Lawprof of the Internet. Open the door to the exam room carefully....

The last exam was in media bias, and some excellent answers were turned in there. This is a difficult assignment for a class in Creative Misinterpretation. You've got to get up to speed with the "Gatsby" project sentences. I think there are about 30 or so of them by now. If you've been following along,  you have your favorite phrases — "leaking isolated and unpunctual tears," "contiguous to absolutely nothing," "a puddle of water glaring tragically," "I suppose it is the latest thing to sit back and...," "stirred the gray haze," "warm human magic,""mashed potatoes and coffee," "hot whips of panic," "the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling," "shadows... rouged and powdered,"  the "continually smouldering" nerves under the "spotted dress," the "crowded hams," cooking things through bewitchery, "suck on the pap of life," "tortuously, fashionably," "the real snow, our snow," nibbling "at the edge of stale ideas," "a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden," and — of course — running out of a room calling "Ewing!" and returning with "an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair."

Either you've been following along or you haven't. If you haven't, you could try to catch up, or you might want to run right out of the room, in which case, just humor me by calling "Ewing!" as you go.

Now, what happened yesterday was that I toyed with the idea, suggested by Original Commenter Genius Palladian, that we should abandon "Gatsby" and switch to "Paradise Lost." I only veered into that because the "Gatsby" sentence included "rivulets," and I looked up "rivulet" in the OED and saw a quote from "Paradise Lost." I found the entire "rivulet" sentence — 18 lines! — and reprinted it in the post, and that led Upstart Commenter Genius betamax3000 to riff in a strange manner:

"The tears coursed down her cheeks — not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily bedded buttocks they assumed an inky color. She went out of the room calling 'Ewing!' and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair. Tears coursed down his cheeks, too, an indefinite procession of cheeks, that rouged and powdered on an invisible ass...."

It goes on, collecting and repurposing sentence fragments from past posts (into which we are borne back ceaselessly).  That gave me the idea for a new exam. You can decide if you want to compete at the basic or the advanced level. At the basic level, you need only combine fragments from the "Gatsby" project sentences in any way that you think might amuse us.

If you would like to compete at the advanced level, I'm a little worried. You'll have to be very tough. At this altitude, it's 4.6 °F and feels like -11 °F. You have to take the 18 lines of "Paradise Lost" and redo them using the fragments from "Gatsby" project sentences. You know, Gatsby is the snake, trying to get Daisy alone. Daisy is futzing with the drooping flour/flower stalks.  The Garden of Eden becomes the "Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden."

Time limit: You have until the temperature hits 32° in Madison. Answers may be submitted in the comments. Grades will be arbitrary or nonexistent or the incomparable milk of wonder.

"Opt Out of State Standardized Tests" — Facebook page run by a high-ranking NYC Department of Education official.

According to the NY Post, Lisa Nielsen is promoting truancy on test days.

On Thursday, she blogged that kids would learn more by cutting class on exam day instead of being “sentenced to sit and start [sic] into space.”

... [She] recommends that parents or volunteers plan group activities and "put together a fun pass book for testing days with discounts to local zoos, museums, theater, etc.... They’ll all be empty since most young people will be locked up taking tests."

"The great Arthur Miller sent his NYU 1L Civ Pro class the exam instruction sheet. Except… he sent us the whole exam. Lulz."

There may be a couple of solutions, but one is obviously the best, and that's what Miller did. The students got some "lulz," other profs experienced twinges of vicarious pain, and Miller got to teach the world 2 more lessons — what not to do and what to do.

"An open-book exam still distinguishes good students from poor ones..."

"... is preferred by the students, does not seem to decrease learning and retention, and decreases anxiety levels."

Says a new study, which you can read here (PDF). I found that via The Chronicle of Higher Education, but you can't get to that article without a subscription.

I do open-book exams, by the way, and for precisely the reason stated above.

ADDED: If you don't want the test to be a test of who's most susceptible to anxiety, you've got to go with open book, right? It's not that simple. Knowing it's open book may help students feel calm before the exam and save them from devoting study time to ensuring memorization, but there's still the experience of seeing the exam question and knowing you're pressed for time. There's that big book to consult. Are you leafing through it, wondering where the answers are, while others are already writing?