“How am I doing in your course?” It is a perennial question from first-year law students, who are anxious about how they are performing in a new academic arena and eager for feedback from the authority in the room, their professor. It is also a fair question. Students should have a sense of both the expectations that their professors have of them and their progress toward meeting those expectations.
The trouble is that answering the question is not so easy. For one thing, professors may feel like they have already answered the question. Professors in legal writing courses typically provide students with a substantial amount of formative feedback during the term. It is precisely the purpose of this feedback to indicate to students how they are doing in the course. Yet, many students do not perceive their question as having been answered by this existing feedback. For these students, the professor providing simply repeating the same kind of feedback is unlikely to be helpful. Rather than more feedback, these students’ experience suggests that they need more support and guidance as to how to build their assessment literacy—that is, their ability to interpret and use feedback effectively.
The other reason that “How am I doing?” is a tricky question is that it is not the real question much of the time. From the context in which it is frequently posed, many students seem to be truly asking, “What grade am I going to end up with at the end of the course?” And, relatedly, “What exactly do I need to do to get an A?” These implicit questions are no easier to answer than the explicit question that they lie beneath.
For one thing, the question of what grade a particular student will end up with at the end of the course is unanswerable. No professor can make reliable predictions about a summative assessment when the course and the student’s learning are still in midstream. Nor should a professor answer this question. Suggesting midsemester that the professor already feels confident what a student’s final grade will be promotes a fixed mindset in learners and encourages students to check out by communicating that nothing they do over the remainder of the semester will measurably change the ultimate assessment of their performance.
The second hidden question “Exactly how do I get an A?” is tricky for a different reason. It can theoretically be answered—in fact, if the course is well-designed, the course materials and the feedback that the professor provides together should indicate to the student what an excellent performance looks like. But it is the wrong question, or, at least, it is directed at the wrong person. Students should be reflecting on and answering this question for themselves. At their core, legal analysis and writing courses seek both to teach students fundamental techniques and to equip them to independently make wise judgments about when and how to deploy those techniques in their own writing. Part of what students are learning (and ultimately being evaluated on) is their ability to determine how to meet the objectives of a particular piece of writing in a professional voice that is authentic to them. A professor cannot literally tell a student precisely what they should do to earn a top grade without doing a core part of the student’s lawyering work for them. Even more fundamentally, telling students exactly what to do to earn an A would undermine their learning. Learning theory tells us that students learn much more deeply when they actively work through and even struggle with how to solve a problem for themselves rather than passively being told how to approach it by the instructor. Both to help students develop their own authorial voice and professional judgment, and to facilitate deeper learning, students should be encouraged to assess and analyze for themselves how they can earn an A in the class based on the information that they have been given.
It seems, then, that a professor has no good or useful response to the question “How am I doing in your course?” and the other questions that often lie behind it. However, these questions cannot be ignored. Students are entitled to know how they are progressing toward mastery of the course material. They also require clarity as to the steps they should take to perform well in the course. When professors leave these questions unanswered, students may experience a great deal of anxiety and uncertainty, which, in addition to being distressing, can distract from students’ ability to learn and achieve. So, what is a professor to do?