One of the things I discovered as a law professor was that no matter how hard I tried, it was almost impossible to make a law school exam that did not favor people who knew more about the subject matter.

This was REALLY obvious to me in law school when I tried to do practice exams from the torts professor who used baseball ALL the time in his tests: you need to know a reasonable standard of care! How do you craft an argument if you don’t even know what stealing a base entails?

But even when I *tried* to make exams that I thought were part of “general purpose knowledge” it ended up that they weren’t. Because a contract for the sale of fruit that fell through *sounds* like it’s basic and everyone should know it...

...but someone would make a really clever argument about mitigating damages that depended on them knowing what a good substitute for the fruit would be. And what do I do then? Not give them points for being clever?

This was not a wholly soluble problem. (At some point I ended up including a definition sheet with my exams so people had basic knowledge, but still.)

To some non-zero extent, law school tends to test the test taker’s ability to have overlapping understanding with the test maker of how the world functions.

So when I see shit like this, I always want to shake people who say that exams are graded blindly and so if Certain Groups perform badly it’s on them.

This is a fucking con law professor. He could google what “chicken tikka masala” is. It’s not hard. He has had, I am sure, students who eat chicken tikka masala.

Shit like this makes me actively angry, because *aggressively* announcing that you *refuse* to learn about any culture other than your own and people who like...eat foods, I guess? are pompous? I mean, what the fuck.

This is the whitest, most fragile bullshit. Can you imagine having to be in this guys class?