Seeking information and ideas on innovative final formats

I have long been troubled by the traditional time-pressured, in-class law school final exam format.  In over a decade of teaching, I have always used a take-home format for my upper-level courses: I will often use a  48-hour format if I want some issue-spotting questions and a two-week format if I want more policy/research questions (and I always have strict word limits for each question).

In first-year classes, however, the use of non-traditional exam formats seems to create added stress for students and also creates some additional administrative headaches.  For this reason, I have traditionally used the standard in-class final exam formats for first-year classes (though I have been noticing some colleagues gravitating toward the one-day, eight-hour take home format for more and more 1L classes).

Never content to make things easy, this term in my Spring 1L Legislation course, I decided to try a combined take-home/in-class format (details here).  Though I do not yet know if my students liked this approach (perhaps they will tell me here), I do know that I liked the basic concept of combining the take-home and in-class formats for 1Ls.  I am wondering if anyone else has ever tried this and, more generally, about experiences and ideas concerning truly innovative final formats.

Posted by DAB