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The article paints Moeser as a villian -- she refuses to accept the fact that their system broke and compromised the integrity of the results on an exam, and in
by wfo 11y ago
The article paints Moeser as a villian -- she refuses to accept the fact that their system broke and compromised the integrity of the results on an exam, and instead insists that the students are just getting dumber, the eternal complaint of the aging generation, and are getting worse at taking an exam she declined to ever take herself. It's mind-blowing she is allowed so much power to shape what American lawyers look like, but this is coming from a profession that works very hard for 3 years to completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ergothus 11y agoOne of the understated parts of the article was where they compared how the poorly scoring set did on the EXACT SAME QUESTIONS as the previous, better scoring set was. All pretense and human drama aside, that sounds like a pretty reasonable foundation, and it rates against the poorly scoring students. I don't want to ignore the likely real emotional impact of the technical snafu, but considering the extreme stress the students are already under, I doubt it would explain the degree of difference. Getting actual reliable metrics one way or the other would be difficult, but essential, I think.
- wfo 11y agoHer quote was fairly damning in the face of a huge screw-up, other metrics aside: she didn't consider the possibility that the snafu had something to do with the dip in scores and then after careful analysis decide the effect was negligable, she explicitly refused to consider it because it doesn't fit in with her narrative.
- monochromatic 11y ago> completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about.
- pdabbadabba 11y ago> Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about. Or law school. My law-school experience was probably 1/3 learning the rules and 2/3 trying to understand or critique the moral underpinnings of those rules. This relates to a common misunderstanding about lawyers. A good lawyer's real skill is not knowing the rules--there are too many of them. Our skill is in rapidly learning and applying the rules to new situations, and understanding how the relevant power structures will react to our client's situation with respect to these rules. An understanding of the moral and policy underpinnings of these rules is key to doing this effectively.
- wfo 11y agoI have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience, discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them is like talking to a wall. Something happens to them in law school: they concern themselves with only what can be argued in court and precedent, probably because they must in order to do their jobs. I have heard so many different paraphrases of the quote "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" from so many different lawyers. I can only imagine the moral hardening that must take place to work in a the kafkaesque legal system that generates so much horrible injustice every day almost by design and sleep well at night; the claim of a lack of ability to moral reason is not really an attack on the character of lawyers, but rather a cry of sympathy for people doing adapting as they must to survive and still work in the field. People who inflict enormous amounts of suffering upon others as part of their jobs (prosecutors, cops, prison guards, criminals, judges) develop these attitudes as a defense mechanism.