Abiola,

I honestly don't see it as a solution. It might help us, as students and potential employees, in that employers wouldn't be able to characterize us based on our law school grades, but it doesn't solve the problem of them finding good meat. None of the other things they would look at would actually be tasting the meat, it would simply be tasting what we give them...it would simply force them to roll the dice and hope they get a good can. I honestly don't believe that firms have a better idea of what type of students they're getting when it comes to our peer schools that don't issue letter grades...from all the recruiters and employer's I've talked to about the HLS/YLS/SLS?BLS system, it seems that all they do is try their best to turn the "grades" those schools do give into something they can use, hoping they get a good can (HP, P and LP are still grades)...but maybe I'm wrong. It also seems that they rely a lot more on their undergraduate grades, something they would likely do with us if we got rid of grades. Don't get me wrong, I think getting rid of grades is moving in the right direction, but I don't see it as a solution.

Also, yes, a great deal of attorneys have told me that law school is nothing like practicing law, but 90% of them have also been transactional attorney who barely do anything legal. In talking to litigators, both in the public and private sector, it seems that a great deal of them disagree with the statement that law school is nothing like practicing law. While yes, they echo that we still have a ton to learn before we can become standalone attorneys, they seem to disagree with the statement that law school as a whole is nothing like practicing (some types of) law. Lastly, while I don't disagree with the statement that how well an individual does in law school is not a good indicator of how good of a lawyer he or she will become, I also don't agree with it. To me, if the system was that flawed (in that grades we're completely useless and didn't decide anything), it would seem that employers would place a lot less weight on them.

In the end, maybe the system is flawed on an even deeper level (assuming that this isn't the way the system was mad to work). For example, in the beginning we have good meat and bad meat. Because we can't effectively separate the good from the bad, we assign them grades that don't rightly define them. The good meat that gets a good labels gains confidence and becomes a good lawyer, and the bad meat that gets a good label gets a good start, but is soon doomed by the fact that they are bad meat. On the other end of the spectrum, the good meat that gets the bad label is shaken at first, but because they're good meat, they still succeed; the bad meat that gets the bad label does nothing, and ends up exactly where they would've ended up if they had gotten a good label. If that's the way the system actually works, which I honestly don't know, then grades and whether or not employers look at them means absolutely nothing in the long run...and we basically shouldn't worry ourselves about them.

Ps: I realize that this has deviated from the original purpose of the thread, but I sill ascribe to the view that late grades don't benefit students.