Very interesting discussion. There a few points I have some thoughts about.

+ Anxiety: What kind?

I think it's important to distinguish between different types. As Erica points out, there is a kind of anxiety that is inherent to the human experience. There is also the kind of anxiety that comes with dedication to doing an important job well. But there's another kind of excessive, unhealthy anxiety, and I think that's the kind that law school often induces.

Hans Selye, a McGill? psychologist (my alma mater! also - go Canada!), who did research on stress, distinguished between eustress, which is a type of stress conducive to grow, and distress, which is destructive.

I think that the traditional law school experience tends to go overboard into distress, beyond the normal quota associated with human life or striving for excellence.

+ Grades and Education Reform

I think part of the cause of this surplus anxiety is the requirement for curved grading based on a single high-stakes exam (tangentially I happened to have two closed book exams first semester - even worse in my opinion). Not only does this grading system not measure much of anything, I think it creates distortions in the substance of what we learn and how we learn it.

That's why I think the proper framing of the issue is not grade reform, but education reform. Evaluation systems can't be cabined off from the rest of an education system, because the evaluation system affects the other parts of the system. It's not just grades that are stake - it's really about education more broadly.

Taking a cue from Felix Cohen, we can consider that a thing is what it does. What the current system does is turn out large numbers of graduates who tend to work for large firms. The grading system as it is apparently serves that purpose well enough. As mentioned above, it helps firms sift through large numbers of applicants with minimal effort. Incidentally, curved grading based on a single exam also making teaching a lot less demanding for those professors so inclined.

But is this really the best way to educate lawyers? As Eben points out on his page about grades, lawyers used to be trained through apprenticeships, which offered mentoring and individual feedback. University-based legal education was supposed to produce a better outcome.

One thing that I have found frustrating is that it is difficult to find an entry-level job in public interest environmental law, my area of interest, without several years of experience. I wonder why, after three years of legal education, graduates are still considered unprepared for entry-level attorney positions. Part of this may be a matter of the job market - perhaps it is not that a new graduate would not be capable, but rather that competition for positions of this sort is such that groups can raise their hiring standards.

However, I can't help but wonder if a differently structured law school experience might produce graduates able to practice law at higher levels of effectiveness. Less “transcendental nonsense,” more individualized feedback from faculty and more emphasis on faculty teaching skills, not just research, might be a way to get more value out of the three years.

Education reform is a fight we all have a dog in, and I am very interested in thoughts about how we get there. In particular, I would be interested to know more about how and why Yale Law made their changes. Tangentially, I think moving to a High Pass – Pass – Low Pass – Fail system is just a cosmetic change. I mean, the traditional system is already predicated on sorting large numbers of students into four categories, so this is really just relabeling boxes. I don’t think that constitutes genuine reform. It might also be interesting to make a wiki page for the history of education reform efforts at CLS. Eben has mentioned some stuff about in class, and some info is also mentioned in a post above.

-- DevinMcDougall - 04 Feb 2010