It is that time of year again when law profs are up to their ears in grading exams. (Unless one teaches on the continent, where exams are oral.) Given my location in the UK, I thought I would provide a few insights on what we do here.  These are my own personal reflections and I may not be able to generalise about what gets done across the board, though in the UK we probably have more uniformity of policies among law schools and universities generally than in the US. What I am about to say is nowhere near complete in coverage. I want to focus here only on some differences which caught my particular attention as an American teaching in the UK.

Preliminarily, we don’t use the word “grading.”  The term is “marking.” This is terminological. They mean the same thing. I’ll stick to the American terminology here.

We allocate grading and just about every other task to be done in a British law school through something called a “workload allocation.” A workload allocation is a bit of distributive justice. It is meant to allocate work in the school fairly among all faculty (we say staff but I’ll stick to the US word). So, if you are called upon to chair a busy committee, you get credit for that in the workload. The workload will include time for you to do scholarship if scholarship is part of your job.

Here comes the interesting part for those of you saddled with large classes and large amounts of exam grading: exam grading is also subject to the workload allocation. You may be asked to grade in a course (a ‘module’) you did not teach.

In the UK we don’t use sections because we teach through lectures and tutorials. Some law schools have moved away from the smaller tutorial and toward the larger seminar to couple with lectures. At Durham we still use tutorials and I just learned that all of us are required to have at least eight chairs in our offices for students. At Durham and likely elsewhere some courses in the upper level LLB and in the LLM with lower student numbers are taught only as seminars, with no break-out between lectures and tutorials (or seminars). There will be a teaching team associated with a required course, which will include a course leader along with a team of staff who have lectures and tutorials allocated to them in the workload model. I won’t get into how all of this is organised, but I hope you see the point. No single staff member can possibly grade all first year Contract or Tort exams, for example. Sometimes exams can be allocated to everyone on the teaching team but sometimes not. You may be asked to grade exams for a course you did not teach. You will be asked to grade exams only in your area of expertise. For example, I am back from a sabbatical that ended after the Easter Vacation (spring break) and was allocated scripts to grade in a particular course in which I have expertise. We get rubrics from the exam writers of course.

Exam grading is accomplished along quick deadlines similar to those in the US, even though the entire process might go on for longer than in the US. Why? After you hand in your “first marking” the exams go off either for “second marking” or “moderation” (sample reading) by another staff member. And then after that, exams are subject to external examination by a staff member from another law school. This quite understandably takes a while. We don’t end up having graduation ceremonies until early to mid-July. Most courses are not graded only by exam. There may also be coursework, essentially a take home essay, which is also put through this process.

One drawback to external examining and second marking or moderating: how to grade oral tasks in class or class participation? There are ways to grade oral tasks in class. But I have never heard anyone voice a need to grade class participation.

Could you see the workload allocation concept at work in US law schools? US law schools already do a form of limited workload allocation by reducing teaching for associate deans and some workload allocation concepts are informally at work in the USA if I am recalling correctly, but nothing as systematic as we have here in the UK. Think of the implications: If a colleague does not take on a significant committee role, then the associate dean can assign him or her more teaching and grading…..

- John Linarelli