Re: Way OT: Comic strip Pre Teena

But the point is, a well-crafted MC exam is the product of time and skill. Not many people have the skill or are willing to put in the time.

Elizabeth

Yep. If you give K. a chance to answer you, she'll give you great answers, but if you give her choices, she dithers.

Elizabeth

I always loved his tests. If you paid attention to the reading, you would do well. Lots of them were direct quotes or captions.

C

A combination of all, I imagine. As for mathematics, it`s mainly a matter of either having that kind of brain or not - much as some brains are musical or artistic and some aren`t. Nurture can either encourage or totally DIScourage what Nature provides.

Pat

I am so very glad I didn't have anything in my mouth as I read that line.

Cheryl

And I had a law school prof who was interviewing for a job in the new president's cabinet, and we swore he wrote the exam on the plane home from DC. There were some questions where even the best students in the class thought it appeared none of the responses were correct (without a None of the Above option) and some where it appeared that all of them were half-correct (without an All of the Above option). We ALL did poorly on it.

Ethics is in the eye of the beholder. This was law school, where you expect some people's ethics to be shaky from the get-go. The conclusion of our ethics prof was that as long as you could justify it to yourself, it's your own personal ethics. He was there to lead us along the path to defining our own personal ethics about the things that are on the official Thou Shalt Not list.

If some lawyer wants to seed public opinion with slipping info to the media that (according to your and my ethics) constitutes violating client confidentiality, he/she learned from my comments in that class that there is a way to communicate to the media without actually saying out loud "my guy says ___", which is codified as a no-no. If he/she can justify it in his/her own mind that as long as you don't say it out loud, it's acceptable ... "I didn't give the journo that information, he was reading something on my desk he had no business reading".

OTOH, we had some people in that class with extremely high ethics, who would beat themselves up for the next 50 years if I hadn't warned them that some journos can read upside down and backward, and they found some of that upside-down information in the newspaper the next morning because they never thought to turn that memo face-down or stash it in a drawer before the journo came in.

There were similar discussions about having a relationship with a client. At what point along the continuum between consoling hug and in flagrante delicto does your personal ethics say stop? (As we learned in the Clinton era, there are people who think oral is not "sex".)

My major ethical problem came up when an old DBF was opposing counsel and I was newly single. The managing partner advised me "you know what you shouldn't say to him, don't say it" and gave his blessing to re-starting the relationship without either of us bowing out of the case, as I had offered to do. (That subject has since been codified and the DBF would have been facing the Bar Ethics Committee for dating someone from the opposing office while the case was ongoing, but at the time there was nothing in writing.)

There was a standing joke between us "you don't know, or you know and you're not allowed to tell me?", but that was as far as his prying went

-- he knew that if he asked for anything more than "do you remember the date of the next court hearing?", I was going to take a message and have someone else get back to him so there was no question about whether I was feeding him information on the case.

The subject never even came up when we were outside the office, and everyone was happy. But because other lawyers are less ethical, now we wouldn't be able to do it even with the blessing of our respective bosses.

Bullshit.

Elizabeth

Absolutely. While I good MC exam takes less time to grade, it takes a lot more skill and time to construct than a well-crafted exam of most other varieties. The problem comes in when folks looking for an easy to grade exam start thinking they can easily create an acceptable MC exam.

What amazes me is not that individual teachers don't develop great MC exams very often, it's that the big money, high stakes MC exams are crafted so poorly! You'd think that when an exam has so much riding on it, the developers would do a better job.

Best wishes, Ericka

And I still remember one year - maybe fifth grade? - when a friend of mine, a very intelligent girl (who is now a lawyer/law journal editor) got SO tired of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills geography section. We didn't know our geography, and we didn't CARE about geography. And any test that says "Where is this imaginary island?" expecting a real answer got no respect from us. "In your MIND, stupid!" my friend said. But they wanted us to recognize that it was drawn on the Tropic of Cancer or some such stuff...and we didn't know Tropic of Cancer from anything (we were even too young to consider Henry Miller - curiosity about that didn't come until high school!)

So my friend just colored random dots...and got a percentage in the high

70s on the geography section. Which made her scoring graph dip severely, since she had 99s in reading/writing/comprehension. (Though she was never a math whiz, and that score probably was "only" 90%, LOL!)

One of my high school teachers excelled in writing tricky history tests with T/F statements. The challenge was to evaluate two parts of the sentence, and determine each one...so the answers were TT, TF, FT, or FF. Sometimes it was a true leading statement but false reasoning supporting it, etc. You had to know your facts to evaluate those!

Sue

Elizabeth What you said. Dawne

As the prof said, your ethics are what you can justify to yourself.

There are people who think it's OK to steal food if they're a little hungry, others who would only do it if they were half-dead of starvation, and others who wouldn't do it under any circumstances. Each of them is acting on their own individual ethics, and so it is with lawyers.

If the lawyer is interpreting client confidentiality as only "you don't say it out loud" then in his mind it's OK to leave papers where a journalist can read them, and he's off the hook with the Ethics Committee because no one can prove that he did it intentionally. (Unless he was stupid enough to say to his secretary "hold the journalist at the door until I can put the Smith file on my desk open to the memo I want him to read.")

Will he have to answer for his questionable ethics at the Pearly Gates? Absolutely. But at that point, it doesn't matter to him whether the Bar yanks his license.

I don't know about where you worked, so your observations might be entirely correct in your context. But where I am, the Bar Association is quite vigilant, rulings on ethics are circulated to all members regularly, and one would have to be willfully blind to think that client confidentiality could be so cavelierly brushed off. Of course, we have far fewer lawyers per capital than you do, so shady dealings are much more visible and easier to deal with. And in my experience, most lawyers took their role as officers of the court quite seriously. But ethics, what is the right thing to do, is not in the eye of the beholder. The person who would resort to those tactics shows they are well aware of that. Dawne

That professor was both incorrect and irresponsible. People like that shouldn't teach, but perhaps he'd lost his license to practice law and had no other option. Or (more likely) perhaps you just misunderstood him when he was giving a counter-factual.

If that were true, there wouldn't be a bar association nor a committee on ethics.

Which no ethics committee would agree to.

Re-read your last two paragraphs. You've just put the lie to your own claim: "questionable ethics." If the bar would yank his license if they could prove it, then he has acted unethically and your argument is incorrect.

Elizabeth

Her observations are correct only in a corrupt context.

Elizabeth

No chance of misunderstanding when the man repeated it every day in different forms, that you had to follow your own conscience, whatever that might be. Here's what the Bar Association says, interpret it however you feel comfortable. He recognized that some of us were willing to tap-dance on the line, some would readily step over the line, and some would make darn sure they stayed well inside the line.

What you and I and Dawne deem "questionable ethics", someone else may think is behaving just fine. Look at all those cheating husbands out there who manage to justify their immoral behavior; lawyers are the same way, only more skilled at parsing words.

But they have to catch him first, and prove it was intentional second. And, at least in this state, the Bar Association isn't particularly pro-active ... it took them nearly 20 years to disbar the sleazebag I worked for, which should have been done already at the point that I quit, because I'd documented quite enough serious ethical violations, including telling clients he was a lawyer before he even knew if he'd passed the Bar exam. Didn't surprise me he was disbarred, what surprised me was that it took so long.

I don't think any of us in this discussion would say "it's OK for a lawyer to misrepresent the law". Am I correct in that assumption?

I have a series of letters from opposing counsel in my case doing just that: "Oh, no, you have absolutely no right to ask for changes to your medical records." So, I get the government agency responsible for oversight to clarify my rights, send her a copy of their letter explaining in layman's terms, and get back "Oh, no, you have absolutely no right to ask for that" despite the fact that I've sent her the letter from HHS saying that I do have that right. So, I get the government to send me a photocopy of the actual page of the US Code with the actual text of the HIPAA law that says if the information is inaccurate they have to change it, send that letter and The Law to her, and the next letter I get from her says "I never said you couldn't ask for that, I said you had to fill out this form requesting corrections and detailing what corrections you want made and providing proof the statements are inaccurate." (PS, the corrections still haven't been made.)

And I send this pile of letters to the Bar Association proving she's been lying about the law to make me go away, and then lied about lying, and all I get from the Ethics Committee is a nice letter thanking me for my letter.

In toto, I documented nearly a hundred places where the woman lied to me and about me, many of them where she misquoted/misinterpreted something in writing where it could be proven exactly what was said. The Ethics committee did nothing except thank me for writing.

Her personal ethics said "all is fair in love, war and litigation", even lying through her teeth, but neither the judge nor the Ethics Committee said a word about her unethical behavior. By their silence, the Bar condoned her actions, even though the written Code of Ethics says she committed a major no-no.

I figure it'll take 20 years of continued complaints before they get around to disbarring her, too. So, in the long run, at least in this state, my Legal Ethics prof is correct, that primarily you have to answer to your own conscience. The Ethics Committee is out there, but the real sleazes know that they have more bark than bite.

One of the last cases I worked on was a legal malpractice claim. In the first week or so that we had it in the office, I was doing the basic research. I came sprinting upstairs from the library with a case book in my hand -- the leading case on why Thou Shalt Not do what Atty. Cheatum did involved, you guessed it, the exact same malpractice by the same Atty. Cheatum 15-20 years earlier.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I make a mistake like that, I learn from it and never make the same mistake again.

And despite the fact that there was a published case showing that this was the second time this same guy had made the same mistake, the Bar STILL hadn't yanked his ticket.

In theory, the Bar Assn/Ethics Committee are deterrents. In reality, you can get away with a lot before they actually punish you, so in

99.99% of cases you really are answerable only to your own conscience now, and St. Peter later. It doesn't matter that you and I think it's questionable ethics, because he's going to get away with it, and my prof knew that.

That doesn't make the behavior ethical, which is what you were arguing.

Elizabeth