Sorry, maybe "objective" wasn't the best word to use in that situation. What I was trying to say is that they are one of the few things that we can't tamper with as students. Flawed as they may be, they are what they are. While I will agree that grades should never define an individual, from an employer's perspective, how else are you suppose to initially differentiate between the meat worth tasting and the ones not? Not only are employers receiving hundred or even thousands of applications per position, a lot of the applicants are often very good candidates. Without grades, they're forced to taste all the meat, something that's just not economically feasible. In the end, because no employer realistically has the time or resources to taste every can, they read the labels in order to set aside a pile of the ones they want to try. While they will miss some good meat by doing that, they're hoping that the marginal benefit in terms of the bad meat they eliminate will outweigh the marginal cost in terms of the good meat they discard. Whether in reality this is true or not, I'm not sure, but I can see how one would be inclined to believe that it is.

To me, its seems that what you're getting at is not grades as much as the lack of feedback. I agree with you that we should get more feedback, but that doesn't necessarily mean that grades are bad. I don't see why we can't get both. And yes, grades will probably be dependent on variables such as sex, race and socioeconomic class, but that speaks more to the weaknesses of the education system. We should find a way to make it so that ones success is not determined by your race, sex or socioeconomic background, not just get rid of grading. Getting rid of grading just put a band-aide on a broken bone.

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)