It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Four finals down, two to go.

Today's final was CivPro, one of the shorter exams 1Ls at ND take fall semester. It's only a tow hour exam because it's only worth two credits. They don't get much shorter than that, except for LegRes which was a mere 60 minutes. (And for an interesting point of comparison, consider that LegWri, also worth two credits, had a final on which I probably spent more time on than all my other exams combined.) So due to the shortness of this one, you might expect things to go fairly smoothly. But you'd be wrong. What is law school without the drama?

While the vast majority of students are taking their finals on their laptops via Secure Exam (tm) -- a new option for law students at ND -- there are a few who still have to hand write their exams. This is mostly because Secure Exam doesn't run on Apple computers. So all the law students with their cool-looking Mac laptops (personally, I think the glowing Apple logo is pretty cool) are basically out of luck. Some of the profs will let these students type up their exams anyway, but others make them write.

So all of the students writing their exam today were put in the same room. Unfortunately, the two CivPro profs didn't give the same time instructions. The prof who teaches my section of CivPro was supposed to give us an additional 15 minutes to complete our exam (so we worked on it for 135 minutes); the other prof did not allot extra time. This became a problem when time was called for the writers -- the end result being that those students writing their exam in my section were not given the additional 15 minutes. This is a pretty big deal considering that the writers may already be at something of a disadvantage since most people type faster than they write. It's not clear yet what will be done about this, though early reports suggest that the administration has so far taken a "What do you want us to do about it?" attitude. It is difficult to envision a viable solution that will remedy the situation. Until then, hopefully Professor Bauer will be understanding and sympathetic when reviewing the written exams.

Ok, on a tangentially related but much lighter topic: the world is going crazy. Again. In addition to the whole exam craziness here in South Bend, here are some other examples:

• As I mentioned in my last post, Derek is considering abandoning civilization for several months this summer.
• Brooke's laundry went missing for a while due to a mix-up by the ND laundry service.
• Brad is hallucinating, envisioning law schools subjects as marauding demons.
• And Niki ran head first into a wall of bureaucracy.

Hang in there everyone. Christmas break is right around the corner. If we can all just stay sane for another week, I think we can make it.

UPDATE: Another source says that the Bauer writers were probably not deprived of the entire 15 minutes; it may have been closer to 8 minutes. I think that it's probably still significant, as I didn't really finish my exam until 2 minutes before time expired.