Old USD Law Exam Draws Fresh Ire

About three-fourths of the students who took the final exam earlier this month on civil procedures at the University of San Diego Law School had studied a copy of the test given last year on which 72 of the 100 questions were identical.

The multiple-choice and true-false exam was given in the first-year course taught by Prof. Robert Simmons, who said he was not aware that most of the students had somehow obtained copies of his 1987 exam. The students did not know before taking this year’s final that it would contain so many identical questions.

After complaints from students who did not have access to the 1987 test, law school administrators decided last week to allow all 86 students in Simmons’ class either to take the letter grade they received or to take a grade of “passed.” They believe the solution to the problem to be the fairest, though admittedly imperfect, because no one is penalized.

However, 20 of the 21 first-year students who did not have copies of the test are still upset, according to a committee set up to petition for a reversal of the pass-option solution. Among the 21 are 16 women and all the minority students taking the course.

These students say that the pass option allows some of their colleagues to retain a grade inflated by what they say is unfair preparation using last year’s test. Because of intense competition for law-review honors, scholarships and other benefits based solely on grade-point averages, these students say that they could be unfairly penalized by taking a pass rather than a grade.

USD law school has developed a national reputation for excellence during the past decade and the dispute over the exam illustrates the intensity of competition at the school.

The aggrieved students differ strongly with both Simmons and Associate Dean Walt Heiser over the importance of the availability of the prior year’s test, over the fairness of the solution, and over the effects on grade-point averages.

“The purpose of exams is to evaluate individual student knowledge,” a petition prepared for the dean of the law school reads. “The spring 1988 Civil Procedure Exam failed to evaluate the knowledge of students who had access to the spring 1987 exam.”

The exam in question covered the second

semester of Simmons’ civil procedures class, one of four subjects required of all first-year students. The exam counts for two-thirds of the final grade in the yearlong course and, like all exams at the law school, is graded on a curve. That means, for example, that if a few students correctly answered 95 out of 100 questions but all the others scored 97 out of 100, the 95 raw score would correlate to a D or an F.

“By having the test from last year, you could look at the kind of questions that Simmons asks, think about the answers, and figure out the right answers,” Robin Brandes said. “And then, boom, you start taking the (1988) test and you see all the same questions and you know what are the right answers . . . one student told us that he got 20 answers right that he wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Another student, Vickie Davis, said that those without the 1987 test copy were at a competitive disadvantage because they did not know what type of emphasis Simmons would put on his examination. “I studied without the exam and reviewed material with the wrong slant,” she said. Student Kathy Aguirre said that “people were leaving that (3-hour maximum) test in 40 minutes. There’s no way in the world you could finish that test in 40 minutes unless you were familiar with the language and knew where (Simmons) was going with the questions.”

Student Cindy Eldred said there were questions on the test concerning information that had not been covered directly in class, and that such questions were intended to measure the analytical ability of students as a way of identifying the outstanding performers.

“But the people who had the previous test already knew that Simmons might be asking such questions,” she said.

Covered Wide Range

Simmons downplayed those concerns in an interview.

“Frankly, I am dubious about the advantage that having an old examination gave any of the students because if they prepared for this year based upon it, they essentially were going across the semester’s entire range of material,” he said.

“However, there is the appearance of impropriety, and of disadvantage to those students who did not have access to it, and that is why a special procedure was devised.”

Simmons said his original thought was to give an entirely new exam to the class but that he did not have enough preparation time because many students had to leave San Diego as soon as the testing period ended last Tuesday. (The protesting students said that their colleagues who had last year’s test and did not want to take a new exam pressured Simmons by saying they would all be out of town.)

“So we gave the option of accepting the final grade, after they learned of it, or taking a pass to address what is a difficult and unique problem that I have never faced before,” Simmons said.

Simmons maintained that “clearly, achievement on an exam of this kind is based primarily upon the level of work and industry of the student, whether he or she has come to the lectures, has had an effective outline that is comprehensive, and not on whether or not during part of the (test) preparation time, the student had the exact questions to the exam.”

But he conceded that students generally are aware that objective exams do contain large numbers of similar questions from year to year. And he said that students are supposed to turn in copies of the exam with their answer sheets each year.

“I assume that what happened is that somehow a copy or copies of (last year’s) test got out of the examination room last year” and worked their way to first-year students this spring, Simmons said.

Retest or Pass

The students argue, however, that the only fair solutions are either to retest all students with a new exam next fall or give everyone in the class a pass.

“There are people who have dropped 10 points or more between the first-semester test and the final test and others who improved substantially,” said another student, who asked not to be identified. “There were many students wearing such great smiles when they left that examination room.”

Student Joyce Lamb said she overheard one student “talking about the fact that the questions were the same during a break in the middle of the test.” She and other petitioners say that the grading curve for Simmons’ course was boosted substantially because of the advance preparation, and therefore a majority of the grades are inflated and unearned.

The agreed-on solution “fails to make the injured students whole because the student who earned his or her grade without benefit of the spring 1987 exam is personally injured by someone else’s retention of an unearned grade,” the petition to the law dean states.

Associate Dean Heiser said the students have a right to be upset by what happened but disagrees that grade inflation or major injury to student rankings has taken place.

“It should not happen that questions that are going to be used to test should get out into the public beforehand. That is so intuitively obvious that I don’t know how you come to any other conclusion,” Heiser said.

But he defended the pass option as the most realistic among several considered.

“The test was given and grades were assessed and many students earned whatever grade they got, not because they saw some sort of exam or through any other subterfuge, they just earned it. And when a student has legitimately earned a grade, you think long and hard before you wipe that grade out,” Heiser said.

Heiser said there was no way of finding out which students spent hours and hours preparing based on last year’s test and therefore may have gotten a higher grade than otherwise, or which students decided that looking at a previous exam would not be worth a great deal of time.

“Consequently, the resolution we picked was one that would preserve grades but would not hurt students who felt harmed because they had not seen last year’s exam,” Heiser said.

“It probably is true that some people were helped by this process who didn’t deserve to be helped but I believe that no one was hurt by this resolution.”

Heiser said the students who are still dissatisfied can petition through the dean, or petition him individually.

“I understand the concern that some students believe others end up with a higher grade than they perhaps deserve, and there is the supposition that the overall class ranking could be affected,” Heiser said. “With regard to law review and scholarships, we have said that we will make sure that the people who make those decisions are alert that this particular grade is one they have to treat a little bit differently in assessing how to weigh it in close (comparative) cases because of the process we worked out.”

But Heiser said that, unless a student is performing well in all classes, “that student is not going to get enough of a boost from this (one test) for scholarships or law review or anything else.

“If a student who did particularly well in this class also did well in other classes, then maybe he or she would have done just as well without” having studied last year’s test.