Thank you for your responses. Reflecting now on my earlier comment, Lauren, I realize that my response was tangential to what you're trying to achieve. I definitely do agree that there is great value in questioning the implicit assumption that the interests of potential employers are the same as ours, and I also agree that significant and beneficial changes to the grading system here at Columbia are within the realm of the possible.

Eben, I think your criticisms are helping me understand what drives the practice of grading on the basis of one final exam. I'd like to give the issue more thought and research, and potentially start a new page to discuss the practice of grading on the basis of one final exam if there is interest. Specifically, I think the language of "productivity" helps clarify what drives the final exam system.

One possible (and very tentative) narrative: Both the Socratic Method and the practice of grading through one final exam can be thought of as "technologies" of legal teaching. They allow professors to be more "productive" (in a sense) by enabling them to teach more students per professor-teaching-hour. Good law professors are expensive, as Eben points out--and a higher student-to-teacher ratio helps extract more "students taught" per professor-teaching-hour, while distributing the costs over a larger number of students.

Without adopting substitute technologies (e.g., wikis), I do agree that Columbia is unlikely to be able to give up the "technologies" of the Socratic Method and the final exam while simultaneously: (1) paying competitive salaries to professors; (2) charging competitive tuitions from students; (3) dedicating the same proportion of faculty energy and time to "scholarship" as opposed to "teaching."

Any hope of changing (3) would be a long-term project, which would have to come from pressure from students and like-minded faculty across schools, not just at Columbia. Substituting new technologies for old can yield pedagogical benefits, especially if they improve productivity by reducing the costs of collaboration and interaction, instead of by reducing the amount of collaboration and interaction (which is what is accomplished by the Socratic Method and final exam system).

The language I'm using here is self-consciously economistic; I think there's a lot more to be said on the subject, from many different angles. It is a topic I would like to consider more carefully, and which I hope to come back to after more reflection, perhaps on a new topic page if there is interest.

-- DanielMargolskee - 30 Mar 2009