As an associate dean who deals with exam problems, I felt NYU Law Associate Dean Liam Murphy's pain. As reported in ATL, a visiting contracts professor at NYU – Jide Nzelibe – administered a recycled exam. More precisely, he'd given out his contracts final to Northwestern students as a practice exam last year. Amazingly enough, some NYU students reported this transgression to the deanery. A number of students who had seen (and worked through) these old exams acted honorably, and arguably against rational self-interest, diming out the instructor.
What is a dean to do? Apparently Murphy suggested three options: pass/fail for all; a new exam for all; and, ignore the information and pretend that no one farted. At ATL, Elie says that" the students may be punished for the professor's mistake." Punishment for one student may be a benefit for another, however. There is no good answer. I'd personally vote for the P/F-for-all option…but I'm curious what others think.
Note to all you aspiring administrators: this sort of thing (with lots of variations, of course) happens surprisingly often.
Pass fail is the least bad of the options, I suspect. Can't make people take another exam in the spring: they've got studying for other classes to do. Can't give the advantage to people who've seen the exam. This happened to me when I was in law school, except the prof recycled an exam from 10 to 15 years before. A few people had seen it. Ultimately it was no big deal — we just had a pass for one course.
Dan, This happened to my classmates in law school, and the Dean decided to give all of them passing grades. (Does anyone ever fail with the pass-fail option?) I agreed with that decision, and I think it is clearly the least bad option.
Dan–happened to me in law school and as an associate dean..no good answer and we should remind our faculty about the resourcefulness of students!!!
So is this prof basically toast?
That seems lazy, but beyond that, it shows poor judgment. If you don't have the time to write your own contracts essay, why not just reach out to other law professors at your school and collaborate – (most first year exams are scheduled to all be at the same time). Or reach out to the profs on the contracts listserve?
I agree that the safer thing to do is to write a new exam each year, and that's what I have always done. But why is what this professor did so terrible? So what if he had given the exam as a practice exam, or as a real exam, in the past?
Nothing in the post (or the original article) says that he had distributed an answer to the practice exam, or that any of the students who recognized the exam had inside information about the professor's expectations about a good answer. So just seeing the question — in the course of reviewing many materials, potentially including other past exams of the professor, and without having any reason to suspect that it would appear on the exam — gives them a "huge advantage" (quote from the article) over the other students? Really?
There are only so many issues one can test on a contracts exam. If a student is resourceful enough to look up all of a professor's old exams and practice writing answers to them, more power to him or her — it's probably a great way to learn Contracts.
yes you are right!