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TimelySubmissionOfGrades 10 - 03 Jun 2012 - Main.AbiolaFasehun
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| | Days after we finished our finals we received the following email from the Dean of our law school which I am reposting here:
| | | Regardless, I am more inclined to view grading as a good thing when it comes to something as the legal profession. As lawyer's, we serve clients. If our work product please our clients, they reward us, if it doesn't, they don't. Why cant we view professors as clients? Each semester, we are tasked with providing them with a work product, if it pleases them, they reward us, and if it doesn't, they don't. Just like real life clients have to pick what firms to rank as their top go to firms, teachers pick which students they want to rank at what position--your story about the professor bumping your grade goes to show this. The one flaw with this analogy is that we are also their clients as well. A professor's job is to make sure that we learn how present a good work product. This is the area where things like feedback and a syllabi would be helpful.
Yes, no two people have identical life experience, personalities or intellect, but a lot of people have some that are sufficiently impressive enough to not be able to conclusively pick one over another. When I say "impeccable resumes, interviewing skills and references", I mean that students at schools like CLS probably have very impressive resumes, interviewing skills and references; thus, its hard to differentiate them solely based on that. And yes, you can't quantitatively measure two resumes, but you can say that one resume is better than another, if you have to. Practically, that differs very little from whether you assigned one a higher numerical score that helps convey your overall emotions. In the end, while I do agree that this is a reductive and somewhat dehumanizing "apples-to-apples" approach, I personally see why people use it...its fast, cheap, easy, and more efficient that anything we have at our disposal. What else would you suggest? (I actually want to know if you have any suggestions) | |
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> | - 30 May 2012 - 02:34:41 - JonathanBrice?
Jonathan,
Didn't you answer your question in the first paragraph of your response? Why is it that our peer institutions (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley) have done away with letter grades, yet Columbia continues to hang on? The students at our peer institutions don't seem to be performing worse in the job market with their Pass/Fail grading system. The employers that hire these students don't seem to mind that they must rely on more than grades to make an assessment of a student's capabilities. I would be remiss not to mention a great deal of attorneys who have told me (and I believe you as well) that law school is nothing like practicing law, law school does not do a good job of training future lawyers, and how well an individual does in law school is not a good indicator of how good of a lawyer he or she will become. Comparing law to other fields, a number of medical schools have also done with away with letter grades because of the focus it takes away from education, yet residency programs do not appear to have trouble finding students that they'd prefer to train.
So much of the law school system is flawed; there are too many students and giving letter grades based on a 1L curve is one of the flaws. When I am paying over $70,000 a year for my legal education, I do not want something that is fast, cheap, or easy for anyone involved in the process. |
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