Dear Professors,

Today’s column is for you. Last week, I explored “The Crazy” feeling students get near finals. It is not a pleasant feeling, and the drama that students cause to themselves and to each other is often terrible. However, there is one person who can make that all 1,000 times worse. We’ll call this person a professor.

Professors can stir “the crazy” pot in numerous ways. Often times, the stirring is unavoidable. Sometimes, it is deliberate, or at least negligent. Here are some of the top student complaints (at least as students report them to me).

The exam format when they do not trust you. “The exam will be 100 True/False questions.” But your students are not sure you know the true answer. You made a few mistakes in class. Your true/false questions are laden with assumptions. And, rarely in life are answers to questions True/False anyway. Am I right? ____ True ____ False Or maybe they have no idea what to expect because you haven’t told them. “The exam will be multiple choice and essay. I’ll figure out the relative weights later.” Oh, okay. Your students will prepare accordingly while playing songs filled with hatred towards your soul. Students understand that you procrastinate, much like you did in law school. You probably stayed up until 3 a.m. writing your final. You might even do it while listening to songs you loved in law school. Fine. At least have an idea of what is going to be on it before the review session.

You signal that you don’t care. For example, you have mysteriously disappeared the week before finals and can’t be contacted. Student: Dear Professor, I have a question about something you said in class. Going through my notes, it appears you said X. Just checking, Student. Professor’s Reply e-mail: I will be out of the office and unreachable by e-mail until well after the final exam date. I will be at a life-affirming conference where I will be presenting. If the matter is urgent, please contact my assistant, who won’t know the answer to the question or how to contact me.

You are in your office for office hours and you can’t answer a question to save your own life. Student: What’s the date today? Professor: Well, that’s a complicated question. I suppose it involves the Greenwich Meridian…. Student: Will you be here tomorrow? Professor: Well, that’s a complicated question. Will my car start? I might be injured, or …….. Maybe you’re worse than that. Maybe you refuse to answer any questions at all. When I encountered this in law school, my response to the professor was “it’s okay that you don’t know the answer, I’ll find out and let you know.” You might even give the false belief that all answers are equal. I once took a class with a professor who responded to any assertion a student made with “I think that’s right.” Only the most preposterous answers were met with “mmm…okay…” I tested my hypothesis about her class by making two contradictory statements during class. Each was met with “I think that’s right.” In my mind, she was the link between universes, parallel dimensions in which all things are possible.

You tell the student something that will make them feel insecure. Student: Hey Prof, thank you so much for being in your office. I have a question about X. Prof: Wow, still? I went over that a bunch. I can’t help you if you don’t understand that by now. Student: (Crying)

Send your students an e-mail late Saturday night. Dear Students, I know it is 10:15 on a Saturday night. I’m just sitting here thinking about some of the questions you’ve been asking me. THIS NEEDS TO BE MADE VERY CLEAR: I did not say X in class. I misspoke. I meant Y. That makes all the difference on the final on Monday. Sincerely, Prof. First of all, don’t shout in your email. Second, why did you wait until Saturday night, the one time students are probably not studying (or at least not studying productively)? You also admitted you said exactly that which you denied saying. You’re not sending a compassionate signal here.

The exam proctors screw up. This is a simple fix. Suppose you have students in the same exam in two rooms. Suppose further that you start one class at 12:00 and the other at 12:01. You probably shouldn’t stop one class 3 hours later and the other 3 hours and 30 minutes later. I know this seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard about this happening. Or let’s suppose you have a 24-hour take home, but you don’t bother to check that the library closes at certain hours. Your student checks out the exam, and can’t return it on time. These details matter. Even if others proctor your exams, you’ll get the blame.

Your hypothetical is too close to reality. You skimp on your final exam writing. You teach trusts and estates, and Prince leaves you with a perfect hypo. You write the exam, embellish the facts, and unleash it on your students. Sadly, the students know the real facts, use them to help answer the question, and you then dock them for it. You assumed facts that were not in the question, you write. If only you had changed the name from Prince. Use a deck of cards, or something. Ace? Of Base, no. King? No, that’s taken, too. Queen? No, that’s taken. Jack! Yeah, students don’t know Jack!

“You may bring in a grain of rice and a magnifying glass. You may write anything you want on the grain of rice. This grain of rice and magnifying glass will be the only materials that you will be allowed to use during the final exam.” Or perhaps you assigned 140 pages on one topic not covered in your final exam. Instead, you chose as your exam’s main topic a note from the casebook (located right after a case you didn’t even cover in class). Or maybe you have a ton of sample exams on file, none of which are anything like the final you gave your students. The cognitive dissonance you have caused will likely be transparent on their final exam answers.

Of course, you may not care about all this. You may even feel justified, or perhaps a little sadistic. You may think that all of this happens after evaluations and therefore you are immune. This is the part of the story where I tell you how I registered for a professor’s class after he engaged in some of this behavior in the last class I took with him. I endured the class and waited patiently for the evaluation. I wasn’t alone.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here and on Twitter. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.