Did Professor Clinton Cheat?

No, not on his wife, or even on his girlfriends. His new autobiography raises a question of whether he cheated when he was teaching in the law school at the University of Arkansas in the early 1970s.

Consider the following passage from pages 204-205 of My Life:

I’ll never forget reading one black student’s exam paper with a mixture of disbelief and anger. I knew he had studied like a demon and understood the material, but his exam didn’t show it. The right answers were in there, but finding them required digging through piles of misspelled words, bad grammar, and poor sentence construction. An A’s worth of knowledge was hidden in the bushes of an F presentation, flawed by things he hadn’t learned going all the way back to elementary school. I gave him a B-, corrected the grammar and spelling, and decided to set up tutoring sessions to help transform the black students’ hard work and native intelligence into better results. I think they helped, both substantively and psychologically, though several of the students continued to struggle with their writing skills and the emotional burden of having one foot through the door of opportunity and the other held back by the heavy weight of past segregation.

….

When the Supreme Court upheld the principle of affirmative action in 2003, I thought of my black students, of how hard they worked and all they had to overcome. They gave me all the evidence I’d ever need to support the Court’s ruling.

In another post I would no doubt point out that the principle the Court upheld in 2003 was that “diversity” could justify the discrimination involved in granting racial preferences, but that Clinton does not mention diversity here (not surprising, since it hadn’t been discovered in the 1970s).

But that is for another day. The question that’s interesting for purposes of this post is, How did Professor Clinton know whose exam he was reading?

The University of Arkansas law school, like most law schools, has long employed “blind grading” of exams, where students are assigned numbers and do not sign their names. Thus the professor, in theory, does not know the identity of students while grading exams. (I have commented earlier — here, here, and here — on the oddity of so many professors who so avidly oppose colorblindness for everyone else practicing it themselves at the heart of their profession, but that’s also another story.)

It is clear that blind grading is and was the common practice at Arkansas. A web site offering advice to law students provides sample exam questions from a number of law schools, including sixteen professors from the University of Arkansas. All of them say something similar to Prof. Richard Richards’ instructions regarding his Civil Procedure exam: “Do not put your name anywhere on your bluebooks; use only your exam number.”

Since the earliest example provided here was from 1982, I emailed a query about practices at Arkansas in the early 1970s to a law professor who taught there then. He replied:

Blind grading was then and remains the custom in law schools, including the University of Arkansas. Exceptions commonly apply, of course, for research papers, skills presentations, and the like. But in ordinary courses with ordinary end-of-the-semester final exams, blind grading has long been standard.

So, I repeat: How did Professor Clinton know whose exam he was reading? Did he not employ blind grading for any of his students, or only black students?

In that other post, the one I’m not writing today, I wouldn’t be able to avoid pointing out that the race-exclusive tutoring program that Clinton implemented would be presumptively illegal today, even after the 2003 ruling.

Say What? (15)

  1. Michael Levy July 1, 2004 at 3:24 pm | | Reply

    If the grammar was bad enough (and he was the only student in the class with that distinctive problem), Clinton could have recognized the student from that.

    Also, Clinton may not have known whose exam it was while he was grading it. The grading is only blind until the professor finishes; after that, he gets to see which student earned what. (this would require Clinton to “[dig] through piles of misspelled words, bad grammar, and poor sentence construction” without knowing what color the student was, which would suggest he was willing to do the same for students of any color).

  2. Simon July 1, 2004 at 7:28 pm | | Reply

    I’m not sure why you’re getting so hysterical about this. Most professors who have had more than passing contact with students during the course of the semester (especially if there had been previous written work) recognize writing style, wording, thought processes, &tc.

    A lot depends, of course, on the size of the class, the number of earlier contacts or assignments, &tc.

  3. John Rosenberg July 1, 2004 at 9:44 pm | | Reply

    I wasn’t aware I was hysterical. Thanks for pointing it out.

  4. Laura July 2, 2004 at 7:43 am | | Reply

    I didn’t see any hysteria. And the idea that Prof. Clinton recognized the student from the writing really doesn’t hold up.

    If professors automatically recognize the writers of papers, what’s the point of saying they’re graded blind? If Prof. Clinton was so familiar with this student’s work that he recognized it, why was the tutoring not offered well before this paper was due? As a matter of fact he sez he read the paper with “disbelief and anger” which doesn’t sound like “oh, here’s Joe Blow’s paper, he never could spell worth a damn.”

    I will add that it’s certainly a possibility for a person to get through some K-12 schools without adequate writing skills. But for a person to get admitted to law school without them is a different story. Did he not do any pre-law? Was there no essay required for admission? No remedial writing classes? If the student was smart enough to benefit from law school, he couldn’t figure out grammar and sentence structure for himself? He could understand his texts but couldn’t write a coherent sentence? Hard to believe. But if a person really could get that far without ever picking up the basics of writing, I doubt a few seat-of-the-pants tutoring sessions would do any good.

  5. ELC July 2, 2004 at 10:32 am | | Reply

    The student must have come from one of those families that attended one of those black churches that got torched in Arkansas when Clinton was young. Oh, wait….

  6. Stu July 2, 2004 at 11:37 am | | Reply

    Gee, is it possible that Willie Wanker told a fib just to make himself look good?

  7. Craig July 2, 2004 at 12:53 pm | | Reply

    For the sake of discussion (since I know nothing about the facts of the case), I would assert that blind grading in any small class is virtually meaningless. In every small law school class that I took, the students developed viewpoints over the course of the semester. Based on those viewpoints alone (which would almost certainly arise in an exam argument), you could identify who wrote which paper.

    Further, hearing the viewpoints would allow a professor to identify who had written the paper but would probably not give them as good an indication of the student’s ability to posit a comprehensive argument – as Laura suggested prior familiarity might.

    This may be an indictment of blind grading, but it may also get Clinton out of the purported bind.

    Again, I know nothing more about this situation than what was posed in the post and the follow-up comments . . .

  8. Craig July 2, 2004 at 12:58 pm | | Reply

    Reading through the quoted passage supports my suggestion. If Clinton knew that the student had “studied like a demon,” there is a good likelihood that Clinton and the student had significant out-of-classroom discussions. When grading exams, those discussions could easily serve to alert Clinton as to whose exam he was reading, without Clinton doing anything particularly untoward.

    (Again, I don’t know the facts. Clinton could have learned whose exam he was reading any number of other ways, which I do not here investigate.)

  9. Richard Nieporent July 2, 2004 at 4:05 pm | | Reply

    Earth to Craig. This is Clinton, “I never had sex with that women”, we are speaking about. Why would you believe anything he said?

  10. John Doe July 2, 2004 at 9:19 pm | | Reply

    I cannot beleive that Clinton would take the time to tutor anyone. I can beleive that he would make a B- the lowest grade possible, in order to be liked.

  11. JOEL July 4, 2004 at 11:10 am | | Reply

    Just to emphasize the obvious point:

    What is a person on any color doing in law school if they can’t write a decent sentence.

    Lawyers are nothing if not word smiths. Would you want this person as your lawyer?

    If Clinton flunked him, would the student have blamed it on racism? Turned violent? Gotten himself a lawyer?

    Maybe this student was really just dumb. Anybody can memorize facts, but it takes intelligence to organize facts into a rational discourse.

    In any event, who was Clinton’s anger directed against? The student who was unprepared? Was he angry at the proponets of affirmative action for letting this unprepared student into law school?

  12. Xavier July 4, 2004 at 9:03 pm | | Reply

    In most law school classes there are no written assignments given to the professor before the final exam. The professor may be able to recognize viewpoints, but probably not writing style. I suppose it might be possible to recognize the writing style based on earlier conversations with students, but speaking style is generally different from writing style. I don’t think that would work in large classes. I have heard that professors are sometimes allowed to consider classroom participation as a factor in the final grade. I’ve never understood how that can be compatible with blind exam grading.

    Aside from the questionable blindness issue, Clinton’s actions may have been a net detriment to the black community. I suspect that black lawyers disproportionately represent black clients. If Clinton helped to get an incompetent black man into the legal profession, there may be a number of black clients out there who suffered for it.

  13. David Nieporent July 6, 2004 at 1:21 pm | | Reply

    John’s question is interesting, but there are (as others note) possible explanations.

    But I agree with a couple of the latter posters here: the more fundamental point is whether (assuming this anecdote is true) Clinton thought he was really doing people a favor with his paternalistic stunt. He gave someone who (by Clinton’s own assessment) couldn’t write at all — “an F presentation” — a B-. If the kid’s writing was that poor, the only way he could have gotten to that point in the first place is if other teachers through the years — middle school, high school, college — had done the same thing Clinton did.

    How was he ever going to pass the bar exam? If the bar examiners decided to do the same thing Clinton did, how was he ever going to get and keep a job? At some point, you actually have to be competent. If you’re never held to any standards, how are you going to learn to be? The soft bigotry of low expectations, anyone?

    (I don’t buy Clinton’s story, though, because (a) it’s too pat in making Clinton look like a saint, and (b) nobody has an A’s worth of knowledge but writes at an F level.)

  14. Pejmanesque July 24, 2004 at 1:39 am | | Reply

    BOOK REVIEW–MY LIFE

    I have been a politics junkie since receiving my full component of DNA, so it should come as no surprise that books about politics are a favorite genre of mine. Political biographies and memoirs are favored quite highly as well,…

  15. cheat October 2, 2004 at 12:55 am | | Reply

    I will add that it’s certainly a possibility for a person to get through some K-12 schools without adequate writing skills. But for a person to get admitted to law school without them is a different story. Did he not do any pre-law? Was there no essay required for admission? No remedial writing classes? If the student was smart enough to benefit from law school, he couldn’t figure out grammar and sentence structure for himself? He could understand his texts but couldn’t write a coherent sentence? Hard to believe. But if a person really could get that far without ever picking up the basics of writing, I doubt a few seat-of-the-pants tutoring sessions would do any good.

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