Pen or Printer: Can Students Afford to Handwrite Their Exams?

Every December, as they prepare for their first experience with law school examinations, students inevitably ask their teachers, "Does it matter whether I handwrite or keyboard my exam?" Of course, what the students are really asking is the time-honored question of how to get a better grade, but with a new twist brought about by technology. They want to know whether the process by which a student generates an exam, handwriting or computer keyboarding, affects the final grade. Until recently, handwriting law school exams was the norm, although some students braved typewriters. In the last few years, however, technology has developed to allow law schools to give students the option of keyboarding their exam answers into personal computers. As law students in the typing era who handwrote exams, we (i.e., Augustine-Adams and Rasband) always suspected that those who typed had a certain advantage. Not only would their end product be neater and thus more easily read by the grader (particularly given our own idiosyncratic scrawls) , but a proficient typist could convey more information in the allotted time, which plainly seemed an advantage on traditional first-year issue-spotting examinations. Those same advantages would seem to apply, but even more so, to students who use a computer. As teachers, we have asked ourselves the same question, "Does the form of an exam answer matter?" In our six years of grading law school exams, we have been determined to count substance over form, to grade each exam thoroughly and fairly without attention to the relative effort required on our part to identify that substance. Nonetheless, our suspicion as law students that the form of the exam answer really did matter, continued to nag us as teachers. As we graded, we dreaded deciphering exams with poor handwriting when we could move so much more rapidly through keyboarded exams. Despite our commitment to grade fairly, it became increasingly difficult to tell our students and ourselves that the form of their answer did not affect the examina-