Douglas R. Haddock, St. Mary’s University School of Law Grades, and therefore exams, are very important to law students. That fact makes examinations a significant potential source of learning for students. For many years, I have experimented with the law school examination process in an effort to make my exams a significant part of my teaching, as well as a device to measure student performance and give students some information about their performance. I am interested in presenting a talk on this subject. The most successful experiments I have tried change the examination experience from the traditional three-hour dose of concentrated effort to a less intense, but much longer and, I think, more creative and beneficial exercise for the students. During the past fifteen years I have used one or both of two variations of one basic examination model in most of my classes. I made a presentation on one of these for the Teaching Methods Section at an AALS Annual Meeting some years ago. The basic idea is very simple and I am certainly not the only law professor using these methods, but I am persuaded that they should be more commonly used than they are. About two weeks before classes end, I distribute to students a document usually titled “Information on Facts and Law.” In it, I present a story involving a fair amount of detail with the potential for numerous legal disputes relevant to the subject matter of the class. The document also contains a variety of statements about the law, usually including a number of statutory provisions pertinent to the class. The idea, of course, is that many of the examination problems will be based on the facts presented in this document and will be governed by the legal doctrine presented in it. I encourage students to study the document, alone and in groups, and to creatively imagine legal problems that could arise from the situations presented. Students take this advice seriously and often become very engaged in the process, since they have a chance to anticipate and prepare for their real examination problems. From conversations with students who have engaged in this process, I know that many of them begin to see the potential legal problems and to understand how difficult those problems can be to resolve. In studying the information in light of the course they are concluding and in discussing the material with other members of the class, many students are able to pull the subject matter together and make more sense out of it. I believe that for many students the process becomes the most valuable learning experience of the semester as well as a very focused review of the course. In terms of learning, their imagination takes them far beyond the scope of my three-hour examination a few weeks after they started this process. In some classes, I have used this method combined with a three-hour examination at the conclusion of the semester. At other times, I have combined this method with a take-home exam in which collaboration with other students is allowed. In courses where collaboration is allowed, I am simply extending the process I have seen work well in preparation for the exam to the examination itself. I have experimented with two models of collaboration, one where no limits are placed on the number of students that are permitted to work together and another where groups are limited to four or five students. In no case have I required collaboration. Students are allowed to work alone if they prefer to do so. I am convinced that this collaborative model, on its own or in combination with the process described in the preceding paragraph has significant potential as a teaching device. As I have suggested, these are not necessarily “new” ideas but I believe they are certainly worth a new look by experienced law teachers. In significant ways, they use the students’ own self-interest to help them develop insights and create effective and imaginative solutions to legal problems. Professor Haddock will share his ideas with participants during a special presentation at the Conference on New Ideas on Tuesday, June 12.