mid term results-adjustments for finals to get top 5% Forum

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jess
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Re: mid term results-adjustments for finals to get top 5%

Post by jess » Fri Oct 26, 2012 11:42 am

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Last edited by jess on Fri Oct 27, 2017 2:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

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kalvano

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Re: mid term results-adjustments for finals to get top 5%

Post by kalvano » Fri Oct 26, 2012 11:45 am

My Contracts professor in 1L told us he writes an exam, and he thought that, under the time pressure of an exam, he might be able to get 80% - 85% of the issues in it, after he wrote it.

So unless its a short answer question with only a couple of issues, I do t think anyone gets all of the points on an essay exam.

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dingbat

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Re: mid term results-adjustments for finals to get top 5%

Post by dingbat » Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:01 pm

Jessuf wrote:
dingbat wrote: I keep reading about how professors will write a question with, say, 200 points total, and an A student gets maybe 60. Admittedly, this is at good schools, not TTTs, but I thought it was practically impossible to get all points on, say, an issue spotter.

Anyone else care to chime in on this?
TTTs are notorious for having ridiculously unfavorable curves. I don't get where people at "good schools" get the idea that everything is super easy at a TTT.
I was questioning his claim that he didn't drop any points on his essay questions - I didn't know it was possible (at any school)

tigershark

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Re: mid term results-adjustments for finals to get top 5%

Post by tigershark » Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:59 pm

dirtyjesus wrote:
TheZoid wrote:Op, you sound absolutely insufferable. HTH.
Considering you don't know me, what I had to go through to even be in law school, or know my motivation for wanting to be the best and be in the top 5% with white boys like you that use words like insufferable, I don't see how you can say that.
This is unnecessarily rude.

OP, instead of wasting everyone's time with your not-so-humble brag, go do some CALI lessons, get an E&E, go to office hours, spend your life in the library, whatever. Obviously you self-identified that you have trouble with MC....so get off TLS and go practice if you're that concerned with being top 5%.

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thesealocust

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Re: mid term results-adjustments for finals to get top 5%

Post by thesealocust » Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:25 pm

dingbat wrote:I keep reading about how professors will write a question with, say, 200 points total, and an A student gets maybe 60.

Anyone else care to chime in on this?
This is often true, but professors can be very idiosyncratic. An example from my school: we had an exam where the highest score was 63 points, an A range grade was around 30 points, and the lowest score was around 15 points. I highly doubt the professor knew concretely how many "points" were even going to be available when he wrote the exam; they try to make them dense enough to put everyone under time pressure then they just curve whatever results come out. Any time you test a population with a reasonably difficult test, the results will be approximately normal, because statistics are a supernatural force that dictate our every action.
dingbat wrote:I was questioning his claim that he didn't drop any points on his essay questions - I didn't know it was possible (at any school)
That whole discussion is weird. Your average law school exam (that most deviate from to an extent) is a gigantic issue spotter that touches on a grab-bag full of issues, some of which interrelate and some of which don't. You can't really lose points, and often it doesn't even make sense to talk about "missing" points because the prof might not know how many are possible.

Most law profs then either add a checkmark every time they see a good argument (grade = number of checkmarks) or has a more formal system to accomplish roughly the same thing; i.e. a list of issues and a 1-5 point scale for your treatment of each issue (5 being especially thorough analysis, 1 being spotting without analysis of with faulty analysis, etc.). From there, the "curve" is just the (approximately) normal distribution of the class's scores, with the top score either being the highest A or an A+ depending on how the school works.

Lastly, it is strange that OP (a) had a midterm in every class and (b) received detailed, curve-based results from each exam. Definitely an outlier amongst law school programs.

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