Oops. Accidental Posting of Exam a 'Teachable Moment,' Law Prof Says
Updated: An accidental posting of a law school exam on a University of Oregon School of Law e-mail discussion list last week offered students an opportunity to apply legal ethics rules in real life, their professor says.
The advance distribution of Professor John Bonine’s administrative law exam tested the moral character of students, he tells Above the Law.
Students had an ethical obligation to delete the exam, since it was mistakenly provided to them, and tell him if they had read all of part of it, Bonine explains to the legal tabloid. This “teachable moment” gave them an opportunity to practice the standards they will be expected to follow in their professional lives, he tells ATL’s Elie Mystal—although, apparently not taking any chances, the prof did decide to give his students a different administrative law exam, according to the blog.
But Mystal is dubious about the prof’s analogy to inadvertent disclosure of a confidential document in professional life, especially given the common practice of studying old exams in advance of a law school test.
“If you accidentally come across opposing counsel’s work product, that is one thing. If a law professor accidentally publishes his exam to the entire class, that seems to me to be a different case entirely,” he writes. “Analogous? Sure. Similar? I guess there’s an argument there. But ‘the exact same thing and therefore subject to all the rules and regulations of professional ethics?’ I think not.”
Meanwhile, another such issue is now creating headaches for administrators at New York University School of Law, where a visiting professor reportedly used questions from his practice exam at Northwestern University last year in his first-year contracts exam this month.
Some enterprising students at NYU got hold of the practice test to use when studying for this year’s exam, and now the school is trying to decide how to handle the grading issue presented.
Updated on Dec. 18 to include information from subsequent ABAJournal.com post.
