Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and law professors

According to Law Professor Eugene Volokh, a leading reason law schools have only one exam per course is, that's the way law students want it:

Most law school exams, to my knowledge, involve a single end-of-semester exam. Some comments in this thread argue that this is pedagogically unsound, and that having several exams — a final plus a midterm or two — would better measure people's knowledge. (It might also help students learn the material better.) I'm not sure that this is so, because I haven't looked into the research; but it seems plausible, and colleagues I trust have said that the research does support this. Let's assume then that this is right. Why then the single-exam format?

Some of the commenters identified one important answer: Professors hate grading exams, and would thus rather grade one exam than two or more. . . .

I think there's a lot of truth to this, but let me suggest an extra factor: I suspect that most students prefer the one-exam structure as well, so that there's little pushback against the professors' one-exam preference, and there would likely be some pushback against professors' attempts to shift to the "better" two- or three-exam format.

Well, then, let me propose that most students would prefer no exams at all, with everybody getting a guaranteed "A" or "A+". (Prof. Volokh describes the near-elimination of grades at Yale and Berkeley, and suggests that it is a school's market power which enables it to abolish traditional grading. That's probably true, but is an issue apart from what students would likely prefer.)

Granted, if everybody got the same grade some students would likely resent the students they perceive as having lesser ability getting "A's" just for showing up in class. (Or would you even have to show up? Students probably would also vote down a mandatory attendance policy.) Yet I've never heard students complain that a grading curve is too soft. No small number of law students pick their electives based upon a professor's curve from the prior year.

Speculation that additional exams might increase law student stress is interesting, but the fact is that in most law schools there are professors who hold midterms and I don't recall students wilting from the additional pressure.

Is it presumptuous of me to suggest that graduate school professors should care about which teaching and testing methods are the best means of advancing and measuring student comprehension and ability? That they should implement sound teaching and testing methods even if they prove less than popular with their students?

Professor Volokh speculates that employers don't much care about the accuracy of one grade or another, and presumes that "random noise in the grading probably averages out in considerable measure when you look at the student's entire transcript. Even if a professor views a law degree as nothing more than a rough equivalent to a "union card" which qualifies a student to get employment as a lawyer, I would still hope that the professor would strive to avoid adding "random noise" to a student's transcript.

Your Civic Duty: Go To The Movies

It is a strange era we live in when we are told that it is our "civic duty" to see a movie. Perhaps the stranger part is hearing that argument from George Will, who would presumably have heaped scorn upon somebody who made a similar assertion about Fahrenheit 911. (Beyond how they relate to Will's political philosophies, I neither mean to compare the two films nor to gloss over the various portions of Fahrenheit 911 which were in my opinion deliberately misleading).

George Will adheres to a philosophy that "you should not rely upon your government", but scorns the notion that you shouldn't trust your government:

After an astonishing 56 months without a second terrorist attack, this nation perhaps has become dangerously immune to astonishment. The movie may quicken our appreciation of the measures and successes - many of which must remain secret - that have kept would-be killers at bay.

Who cares that there is no evidence to support his faith in secret successes (based on secret measures). The important thing is to believe.His adoration for a commencement address given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. further evidences his adherence to this version of "faith". Holmes wrote:

But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.

(A quarter-century before Holmes spoke, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, expressed a similar sentiment.) As we all could be "potential soldiers" in this war in which "the front can be anywhere", in Will's view we apparently all owe the government a soldier's trust in his superior officers and unquestioning obedience to its orders. (Unless, of course, Clinton is the President, in which case a bombing attack directed at Al Qaeda is meant "to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life".)

The civics lesson, though, of United 93 can't be to have blind trust in the government. There were many points at which the government could have detected and prevented the 9/11 hijackings. (The question as to whether it would have been reasonable to expect them to put together the pieces in time to prevent the hijackings is subject to debate. The fact that various government actors held the information which, if pieced together, could have been used to prevent the attacks is not.) Will asks us to draw a different lesson:

The hinge on which the movie turns are 13 words that a passenger speaks, without histrionics, as he and others prepare to rush the cockpit, shortly before the plane plunges into a Pennsylvania field. The words are: "No one is going to help us. We've got to do it ourselves." Those words not only summarize this nation's situation in today's war but also express a citizen's general responsibilities in a free society.

That's great, George. The next time I fly I'll be sure to get the passenger manifest in advance, and screen it for suspected criminals and terrorists myself.

With The Exception of Yoko Ono, That Is

Perhaps now that the latest Apple v Apple trademark suit has been resolved in favor of the computer maker, the Beatles and their heirs can get back to making money the way they used to - by creating music.

Everything You Didn't Want To Know About David Brooks

(Sorry, although I'm not sure that I should be - the New York Times links are "behind the firewall".)

Even though I'm no fan of David "Babbling" Brooks, even after I was led to the piece by an email making fun of it, I gave him a pass last week when he wrote an editorial (Lunch Period Poli Sci) declaring that your social clique in high school defines your future. (Pass revoked.)

In that column Brooks only found nuance when describing nerds as the only group which falls into two categories: the bad "liberal" kind who become "scuffed-shoed intellectuals who have as much personal courage as a French chipmunk in retreat", and the good "Brooks" kind who sneer at everybody else in the world - I mean "geeks who have decided their fellow intellectuals should never be allowed to run anything and have learned to speak slowly so the jocks will understand them." Right, David... adult jocks can't wait to listen to slow speaking, condescending, conservative nerds. And the only shift between high school politics and adulthood is a miraculous realization by the jocks that they need the intellectual leadership of people like Brooks. (I'm not making fun of him - he actually says that. How do you make fun of inadvertent self-parody?)

When Brooks says,

The nerds continue to believe that the self-reflective life is the only life worth living (despite all evidence to the contrary) while the cool, good-looking, vapid people look down upon them with easy disdain on those rare occasions they are compelled to acknowledge their existence.

One can picture Brooks in high school, picturing himself as "culturally and intellectually superior but socially aggrieved" and longing for the day when he finally got to sneer along with (and secretly sneer at) the cool kids.

Today in Marshmallows and Public Policy, he tells us about himself as a kindergartener - or at least how he remembers himself - sitting quiety, doing as he was told, and meekly waiting to inherit the earth. Everything he is he was in high school, but apparently it was forecast by his ability to resist temptation.

Brooks references experiments performed by Walter Mischen in the 1970's, testing whether four-year-olds could resist eating a marshmallow for fifteen minutes. If they did not, socio-economic data indicates that they were more likely to develop drug problems and were more likely to grow up to be bullies. If they did not, they were more likely to grow up to score significantly higher on the SAT, go to better colleges, and have better "adult outcomes". Brooks tells us that poor kids, statistically speaking, have less self-control than kids from middle class homes.

While I think it is safe to say that Brooks wouldn't have grabbed the marshmallow, I am not so sure that with somebody like Brooks it would have reflected intrinsic self-control - he seems more like the sort who would have resisted the temptation to avoid the reprobation of adults. Which, perhaps, is why he believes schools should start teaching self-control. That also perhaps explains why Brooks misses what seems to be the essential point of language he quotes:

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis," is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off — and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it over time.

When you take kids for whom school is the most stable and predictable element of their lives, school isn't the problem. Nor is training kids to sit quietly in rows very much of a solution, even if achieved by training them to "distract themselves" by thinking about something other than what the teacher is saying. Brooks suggests that some New York schools adopted programs based upon Mischel's research - why isn't he describing their success?

Brooks also suggests,

Somehow we've entered a world in which we obsess over structural reforms and standardized tests, but skirt around the moral and psychological traits that are at the heart of actual success.

Wait a minute though - I thought we were talking tendencies here. It's one thing to take a study which confirms what is well known, that a person's essential personality forms at an early age, and it is quite another to say that a kid who grabs a marshmallow will not be a successful adult. When Brooks describes "people without self-control skills for whom "Life is a parade of foolish decisions: teen pregnancy, drugs, gambling, truancy and crime, is he not describing the behavior of an awful lot of people in government?

Besides, since when has it been considered conservative to attempt social engineering through the public school system?

Disney's New Position on Copyright - Full Reproduction is 'Fair Use'

Well, not really.

But it is funny to trace back from this comment, the author of which is a Supervising Web Producer for E! Online, within the context that E! "is owned by a joint venture between Comcast (50%), The Walt Disney Company (40%), and Liberty Media (10%)."

After locking a thread in which somebody suggests that E! Online might be sued for allowing forum participants to post the full text of articles cut and pasted from copyrighted sources, an E! employee expressed, "we are looking into a definite set of guidelines to address these types of threads." When challenged further, the E! employee asserted,

fair use anyone?

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

This inspired the retort, "Posting the entire article is hardly fair use."The E! employee countered,

im not trying to challenge anyone. im just saying its not that clear cut. but we'll leave that up to our legal team. for now, please hang tight. thank you.

Perhaps he should run it past this legal team:

Disney Enterprises Inc. and four other entertainment giants are suing two downtown Los Angeles produce vendors for allegedly selling pinatas bearing unlicensed cartoon characters.

* * *

Once, Disney sued a Florida day-care center that showed paintings of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy on its outside walls. The school took down the pictures.

I'm not meaning to pick on E's staff here - I really mean to pick on Disney.

All Roads Lead To Gated Communities....

I am often amused when self-described libertarians engage in argument that really boils down to an abrogation of any sense of a social compact, particularly where they are the affluent progeny of affluent parents.

Because the rich can take care of themselves, the argument goes, the poor should be left to care for themselves. The externalities are ignored. Usually when you get a larger perspective on the speaker, you find an associated set of beliefs and values which speak not of libertarianism, but the notion that they and their wealthy peers should not have to pay taxes which inure to the benefit of people they deem beneath them. They can afford association fees which pay for the private roads of their gated communities. They assume the middle classes can form private associations to assume ownership of their own streets (and any gates they wish to install). And if they can't (or if they're poor), too bad, so sad. That's why God created dirt roads and tar paper shacks.

So when I read something like this,

Many commenters seem astonished by the idea of private streets. My parents have a house in a private, gated community, where the streets are indeed privately owned. Access to the community is for owners and their guests. The community functions quite well, as far as I can tell, and, among other potential advantages, there is virtually no crime. This may not be everyone's cup of tea, but there is nothing either radical or impractical about streets being privately owned.

I am left wondering if the speaker is truly expressing opinions which arise from libertarian notions of private contractual obligations taking the place of government ownership and maintenance of roadways, or if they have chosen libertarianism as the philosophy most consistent with their desire to avoid taxes, social responsibility, and exposure to people with different ideas or (gasp) who are poor.

Your Rabid Dog Lawyers?

I saw a Google AdSense ad for a law firm,

Smith Defense Team
Certified criminal law
specialists Free Consult -
Beyond Aggressive!

(I changed the name of the firm to something generic.)

How does "beyond aggressive" compare to, say, a "pit bull lawyer"? Is it roughly the same, or something more akin to a "rabid pit bull lawyer"?