Procedure for Examination Review. I will be available to discuss examination results during the Spring semester, beginning after Thursday, February 7, 2008. Exams and the respective Feedback Memorandum will be available beginning on that date, when I post it to the website. You may pick up the exam from me. Please bring your exam number with you, as I keep them organized by exam number. You may make a copy of your exam answer and keep it for your records, but you have to return the original to me because faculty are required to keep exams for a few semesters.
Review Policy. Examination review is a good way to learn from your mistakes, and from your successes. I encourage you to review my feedback memo and your exam. I will be happy to sit down and discuss substantive matters with each student. I will first tell each of you what you did right. I will also gladly suggest ways to improve your exam-taking abilities.
No Grade Changes. I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I have never changed an exam grade for any reason other than a mathematical error. Barring mathematical errors, your grade is not going to be changed. Grading is a time-consuming and difficult process. The only fair way to do it is to grade in the context of each class. I look for a fair overall grade distribution and follow the rank of each student within the class in awarding the final grade.
Penalties. I had to impose penalties for exceeding the word limit. Initially, I considered a global system to deduct a certain percentage of the overall exam score. But when I realized that it was most common on just the first question, I decided to penalize exceeding the word limit separately for each question rather than for the entire examination. Accordingly, I deducted a percentage of each question score that was determined by dividing the actual excess by the maximum allowed for each question.
ANSWERS GENERALLY
I discuss this below, but remember the general guidelines, you were expected to:
1) Show that you have a command of the material we covered in class that is pertinent to your answer.
2) Show that you can identify analogous American legal concepts and materials that are the proper subject of comparative analysis.
3) Finally, you should discuss the factual or legal factors disclosed by your research in a thoughtful and original manner that shows your command of the material related to our course. This last part is especially important if you wish to earn a high grade.
In general. 54 students submitted examination answers. This means of course that we are subject to the compulsory mean for upper level courses. The examination results were really quite good. I liked the quality of the answers in general and I rewarded it by going almost to the maximum allowed by our mandatory mean.
I will not give you a very specific sample answer, because I tend to repeat themes in this course more than in any other. However, I annotated your exams and will be happy to have your examine them to see what I tell you was well done and what your weaknesses were. But let me give you some very general comments on the answers I expected.
First question. The question on Patria Potestas required you to refer to our class materials on Roman Law and on the Partidas. You could not get from Roman law to the partidas without showing an understanding of the transition between Roman law and medieval law. You also had to show an understanding of legal evolution, both internally in the 11 centuries of Western Roman law, its survival in the Eastern Empire and in the former Roman territories in what is today Europe. Eventually it gets adopted into the Partidas. I wanted you to describe the systems thoughtfully and to comment on the evolution of the concept within Roman Law and then how it was adopted into the Spanish code. I did not expect any discussion of common law concepts here, as we discussed during the review session. However, if you chose to try it, I took that into account in computing the score. The nature of the question and the word limit made for simple answers. One common mistake was to refer to the Partidas as having been written in the 14th Century, rather than the 13th. Keep in mind that they were drafted circa 1265, even if the Ordenamiento de Alcalá of 1348 made generally binding.
Second Question. I was disappointed by the relatively small number of students who used the veils controversy to illustrate their answers, given how much material you had read on the subject. Also disappointing was that few students remembered to make references to the training of legal professionals and what that says about the nature of the system and the institutions in which they work. That said, the quality of many of the answers here was good. The best answers were really well done indeed. Historically, you had to go back to the American and French revolutions to explain the different approaches taken by each country to separation of powers and constitutionality review. On a fundamental level, you should have known that we have three branches of government, and the French really think of two. I also specifically used the phrase “constitutionality review” to suggest the broader look at the French system’s multiple sources of constitutionality review by the Constitutional Council and the Council of State. The better answers used the French Constitution, which most students clearly found in the websites to which I referred you, to illustrate the relative powers of the organs of the French Republic. You focused well on the roles of the executive branch, led by the President and Prime Minister. Some of the discussion of the United System were excellently illustrated by references to the Federalist Papers and to constitutional provisions and cases.