Attendance, Participation, Quizzes and Grading in Constitutional Law

1. Examination Policy: I will be giving a number of written quizzes during the first semester; your performance on these will not affect your grade directly, but you would be wrong not to give your best effort in answering the quizzes. The quizzes are occasions for you to verbalize what you have been learning and to wrench it out of its prior existence as stream of consciousness in reading and note-taking. This verbalization or articulation is extremely important in Con Law because the course requires you to separate out large, relatively independent chunks of doctrinal development and to hold several of them in your mind at once. A strong effort on the quizzes will assist you to understand the particular portion or area of the law and will also serve as a tool in conceptualizing con law over-all.

2. Attendance Policy: The ABA, the Bar, and the School all require that students be "in good and regular attendance" with respect to course work (Handbook, p. 20). And that will be the policy of this course. It will be enforced by the use of sign-in sheets; these will be distributed at the beginning of each hour of class and circulated during class, to be returned to me at the end of the hour signed by everyone present. You will be contacted if you are experiencing more than incidental absences; ultimately, repeated unexcused absences may affect your grade or even bar you from taking the examination.

The justification for this requirement of consistent attendance is, I hope, the substantial one. I believe, as do most teachers, that it is the incremental and repetitive progress in the material made possible by going over it in class that gives a student the best opportunity of profiting by the class. Classes are scheduled because work on a daily basis is most effective.

3. Class Participation: Being present should be more than passive presence. Effective attendance should include doing the current reading, attending to what goes on in class, and participating in the class. I advise people I tutor that it is a good idea to come into each class with at least one question to ask the Professor. This is not apple-polishing, but a way of formulating one=s grasp of the subject matter under discussion and strengthening that grasp by finding expression for it.

A few of you had me for Property last Fall. You know that I am little loath to talk a blue streak. But that is not my job; my job is to enable all of you to do that. This year, in order to encourage that result, I will find a way to give a grade advantage for effective and persistent participation, in a civil and lawyerly way, in class discussion and recitation. If people=s grades are to be docked for being absent or unprepared, their grades should also profit from good work for class and in class. It always has been true that people who attend class and participate in class discussion profit without regard to having that benefit reflected in their grades; but they should, so far as feasible, also see that reflected in their grades.

Finally, I need your participation as much as you need it. I cannot have a good idea of what is getting across and what is not. There is nothing quite so chilly as lecturing day after day without any feedback whatsoever. I know; sometimes the dynamics of a particular class has left me in that situation. So if you will not participate to gain additional experience in expressing yourself intelligently in public; if you will not participate to get some points; and if you will not participate because it is an extremely useful technique in learning constitutional law, then you should participate because I need you to.