The end of the semester is here. And, once again, I’m giving my Business Associations students a single, end-of-semester exam that counts for almost all of their grade.

My on-line Accounting for Lawyers class is different. My Accounting students have multiple assignments due each week, and they get feedback from me on each assignment. Those weekly assignments count for 30% of their final grade.

I know what the educational research says: a single end-of-semester evaluation is not as effective in promoting learning as multiple evaluations throughout the semester. My experience with regular assessment in Accounting for Lawyers confirms that. Since I began teaching Accounting for Lawyers this way three years ago, the final exams have been much better. Students are clearly learning more, and they have been rewarded with higher grades than I gave before.

So why do many law professors continue to rely on a single, end-of-semester exam?

Student expectations are a major issue. I have tried multiple exams in the past, but my students didn’t like it. After the first year of law school, they’re used to the end-of-semester format; multiple assessments require them to change their study routines. Assessment throughout the semester also changes the classroom dynamic; once you’ve critically evaluated students, the interaction is never quite the same. It’s easier in my on-line Accounting course. An on-line course already violates law school norms, so students expect something different.

Workload is also an issue. Regular assignments are a tremendous amount of work, both for me and for my students. Grading the Accounting assignments and providing feedback takes a great deal of my time, even with only 16 students. My fall semester is spent because of it. There’s no way I could also do this for a much larger Business Associations class.

And, frankly, the students are forced to do substantially more work in my Accounting course than they would in an equivalent classroom course—although it helps that, in an on-line class, students can work on their own schedules. Students continue to sign up for the Accounting course, but what works for one course might not work if they were taking five or six similarly structured courses.

But the biggest problem is probably inertia. If you have done something one way for a long time, and the results have been satisfactory, there’s no serious momentum for change—especially if that change is going to involve substantially more work and require changes to the law school’s administrative structure. In that sense, the end-of-semester exam issue is just a microcosm of the broader issues in legal education today. Will we continue to march forward as before or will we make significant changes to the usual way of doing things?