-- JosephItkis - 10 Jun 2012

Hello all,

I wrote the below letter and am thinking about sending it to Dean Schizer. Anyone who would like to join in on sending it with me is more than welcome (would love to get a big group of students behind this). Any and all comments/suggestions/edits are much appreciated. Thanks!

Dear Dean Schizer:

We are second-year students who wanted to voice our concerns relating to the e-mail you sent to the student body last month about professors' timely submission of grades. While we and our fellow students appreciate that you are asking professors to be more cognizant of the timeline of our job searches when submitting grades, we are worried that the attention being paid to speed in the grading process obscures a much larger and (in our view) far more pressing problem: the serious lack of feedback that students receive as part of their evaluation. There is obviously much debate among the student body as to whether grades should be kept or abandoned, but one thing almost all students agree on is that the amount of constructive feedback we receive to complement those grades is grossly inadequate. Yes, most professors are happy to take the time to go over your exam and point to areas of potential improvement, but many only have the time to do so months after we received our grades, at a time when we have little memory of the issues and the feedback contains little value.

There are larger issues at play apart from busy professors that contribute to the lack of adequate feedback. We understand that there is a long tradition in law schools of students being evaluated by a single exam at the end of a semester or year. But such a system makes it impossible for students to have any real improvement or any guidance from the professors whose mandate is, in part, to teach us how to improve. Our entire grade is based on our ability to spot issues, make arguments and reason logically over the course of four hours, but when we take our exams at the end of first semester, this is the first time that we have done this, apart from a few practice exams that we take in the weeks leading up to the exam, also completed without any feedback or constructive criticism from professors. Our professors spend the semester teaching us the substantive material relevant to contracts or property, but they don't give us any guidance as to how to incorporate this information into a successful legal analysis until after the exam.

Yes, many students don't like grades in part because they create stress and competition, but we largely don't like grades because they seem arbitrary and unrepresentative: They reward students who have an intuitive grasp of the skills required and leave those who don't with no understanding of what they should have done better, and they fail to account for the fact that students who have the ability to improve those skills over the course of a semester can be just as effective lawyers as those who "get it" earlier in the learning process. Giving students more opportunities to be evaluated (either officially or unofficially) throughout the semester would help solve this problem, as would emphasizing to professors how important feedback is to the learning process.

We understand that teaching is only part of a professor's job requirements. We also understand that, as a result, professors have limited time to devote to working with individual students, especially in large 1L classes. But the way the system is set up now, students have very little opportunity to improve upon the skills on which they are being evaluated and which are vital to building successful lawyers; consequently, many students will leave Columbia with largely the same aptitude in legal reasoning and analysis that they came to campus with three years earlier. For those students, Columbia becomes merely a gate they must pass through on the way to a legal career rather than a place that actually builds lawyers. That, we think, is a shame. Again, we appreciate that you have taken the time to pressure professors to submit exam grades more promptly, but we would like to see that the larger problems surrounding the grading process are being emphasized and remedied as well. Thank you for your time and we look forward to continuing this dialogue.

-- JaredMiller - 09 Jun 2012

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.

For me it's pretty simple. When I was applying to different jobs last semester (both firms and other), a lot of places considered my application incomplete until I could provide a fall transcript. Until all my grades were in, my applications to various places were held up and the whole job-hunt process took longer. Now, please don't take that as me saying that grades don't suck and that I think this issue is a top priority or anything like that. Anyone who took a non-Moglen class with me this semester probably knows how much I care about grades themselves. But it was definitely annoying to have my job hunt delayed because a professor or 2 would take a month to grade exams.

-- JosephItkis - 3 June 2012