We were Bud's last class before retirement and while I actually learned a lot in his class and didn't think he was a particuarly bad teacher, his exam was, um, questionable at best. For those of you fortunate enough not to have gone to law school, exams usually consist of hypothetical situations where you have to issue spot, tell what the law says on the issues that you spot, and give a likely outcome. Bud's exam, on the other hand, was more like "compare and contrast easements and restrictive covenants." Seriously, I think that was an actual question. I kind of felt like I had gone back to 5th grade. With an exam like that and a forced curve of 81, you would expect most grades to be in the 78-84 range - pretty hard to differentiate yourself. As best we could tell though, the grade distribution was not at all clustered and there were a handful of really high grades (hard to give out a lot of 95s when you have to have an 81 average) and a lot of pretty low ones. To this day I have no idea how I did so well in that class or how anyone else did poorly - it was as if he just played roulette to come up with our grades.
