Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Exam Length and Grade

My friend and UCLA law colleague Eugene Volokh reports:

Last semester, I for the first time recorded in my exam scoring spreadsheet the length of each answer. This let me figure out the correlation between the length and the grade. ... The correlation coefficient of the total score (which combined the essay score and the multiple choice score) and the essay word count was 0.60, which is huge as correlations go. So longer is better, by a lot, right? The correlation between the total score and the word count for exams longer than the median exam was basically zero.

... Still, it struck me as an interesting data point; and perhaps some students might be happy to know that, past a certain level, quantity and quality aren’t even correlated.

Still, it struck me that my friend Eugene has too much time on his hands.