After Tuesday, February 15, 2000, any student may review his or her exam answer, subject to the following procedure:
1. Get a copy of my feedback memorandum from Ms. Betty Donaldson in the secretarial pool office. You may photocopy the memorandum. (The memo will be available starting on February 15, 2000.)
2. Get your exam from Ms. Donaldson. You may make a copy of it.
3. Review your exam answer after reading my feedback memorandum.
4. Beginning on Wednesday, February 16, 2000, you may schedule an appointment with me to discuss the exam or see me during my regular office hours. Bring your exam with you.
5. GRADES WILL NOT BE CHANGED. I encourage you to review my memo and your exam carefully. I will be happy to sit down and discuss substantive matters with each student. I will first be happy to tell each of you what you did right. I will also gladly suggest ways to improve your exam-taking abilities and to point out why an essay was not the best and how it could be improved. However, I do not wish to sound harsh, but I do want to make one thing perfectly clear: 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 the class. I look for a fair overall grade distribution and follow the rank of each student in awarding each final grade.
Grades. A total of sixty-two students submitted exam answers. They were graded on a 585-point scale. After grading the exam, I looked at the attendance records, participation records and the practical project grades. Only one person failed to pass the practical project. Surprisingly, several persons failed to meet minimum class participation requirements and were accordingly graded down. Finally, as indicated in the Syllabus, I used my assessment of class participation to adjust the final grades, generally upward.
At the beginning of the course, I showed you a list of six sub-traditions of the Civil Law Tradition: (1) Roman Law, (2) Canon Law, (3) Commercial Law, (4) The Revolution, (5) Legal Science and (6) Modern Constitutionalism. The first five come from our casebook authors, the last one, Constitutionalism, is my own. I purposely did not cover the Commercial Law and Legal Science, therefore, you may completely ignore those categories in preparing your exam answer.
As to the four sub-traditions that we did cover: (1) Roman Law; (2) Canon Law, (3) The Revolution and (4) Modern European Constitutionalism, explain how each contributes to the legal structure of the Modern Western European State and how that compares to our own legal system. I want you to focus on the end-product, i.e., what do the legal systems of Western Europe look like today, and how each sub-tradition has contributed to that end result. In writing your answer, you should focus on the legal systems of Germany, France, Spain, and, for comparative purposes, the United States of America.
Let's start with the general description of the answer given to you in the instructions, the answer had to:
(1) Show that you have a command of the material we covered in class that is pertinent to your answer. To this end, provide references to our casebook, handouts, and to your notes of our class discussion. References should be simple and straight-forward. Page numbers for our casebook, accompanied by the prefix "CB-", e.g., page 111 in our casebook is "CB-111". The date of a class session is enough to identify your notes, and the title of the handout enough description thereof. I recommend that you use parentheticals to give substantive information in a short format. Additionally, I recommend that you use a bibliography to make references to any source(s) you choose to use. That way, you can give me the detailed bibliographical information, and you can use a short form of citation in the text. You can exclude the bibliography from your word count.
(2) Show that you can identify analogous American legal concepts and materials that are the proper subject of comparative analysis. This may require you to conduct some modest research outside our class materials. Please keep it simple. I believe that most research can be limited to your first-year casebooks and materials. However, you may use anything you deem appropriate including electronic research systems.
(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.
As I indicated during our review session, answers could be structured as follows:
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Introduction I. Roman Law
II. Canon Law
III. The Revolution
IV. Constitutionalism
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Introduction
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I expected students to structure their answers accordingly. History Description meant displaying a command of the doctrinal material that we covered in class that was pertinent to the answer. Comparison meant identifying comparative American legal concepts and describing them properly. Finally, Analysis and Discussion meant the creative, fun, knowledgeable discussion of the material. This included, in many occasions, contrasting our system to theirs. Contrasting is an important element in comparative analysis, since you have to pick the right institutions to contrast. Simply realizing that we do things differently is an important comparative conclusion. The most successful students earned points by incorporating all three categories described in the general instructions to every part of their answer. Overall, if not individually, the comparisons showed great imagination.
I was occasionally quite impressed by novel comparisons that students developed on their own and discussed intelligently. I also found that students who displayed good fun and creativity in their writing styles, tended to do well. You will see my handwritten notes on your exams, usually something like "GOOD!!" to indicate that I found particular discussion enlightening and impressive.
The improved word-count appears to have been generally successful. I still got the impression that some students failed to allocate enough space to make sure that they covered the most relevant topics. This was an exam in which discussion earned the most points, therefore, too scattered an approach tended to dilute the quality of the answer, and consequently failed to earn a lot of points. Trying to incorporate too much doctrinal material from the text of other sources was also an error, to the extent that it prevented you from showing me what YOU personally made of the material.
In terms of substance, I have found that it is much better to have those discussions individually.
Cordially,
Prof. Pedro A. Malavet