School: Laziness on Both Sides

Today, though I could've read for my summer classes, I decided to watch the "extended DVD cuts" of all three "Lord of the Rings" movies back-to-back-to-back. There's nothing like nearly 12 hours of man-boy Elijah Wood tearing up the screen - I'm not even that big of a Tolkien fan, but I have to admire all-out filmmaking when I see it, especially with such summer disappointments as "Spider-Man 3" fresh in my memory. And for those of you who don't get a kick out of seeing Sean "Rudy" Astin kicking some orcish butt, I feel sorry for you. :-)

My professors are even worse, though. Law school grades are typically based on a single, three to four hour-long final exam. That's it. No papers, reports, homework, or projects - it's usually just a single exam consisting of a bunch of essay questions. And yet it takes more than four weeks to receive our grades (we don't get them until May 30th). While I'm sure each exam takes a good half-hour or so to grade, each professor is only doing maybe 100 papers - and what the heck else are they doing with no classes in session?

Professor Collier's exam was also a source of a huge amount of controversy. Several parts of the exam were identical to a previous exam given three years ago. Of course, since Professor Collier doesn't make old exams available like other professors, some students knew about the previous exam (by tracking it down) while others did not (like me - I only look at old exams when the professor puts 'em up). Given how mind-bogglingly easy it is to make up new Constitutional Law hypos (you can just look at current events or even current undecided Supreme Court cases), I find this lack of effort...disturbing.