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> | How Law Schools can Grade More Conscientiously |
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< | The Evil of Mystified Educational Metrics |
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> | -- By ZongweiHu - 23 May 2025 |
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< | -- By ZongweiHu - 21 Feb 2025 |
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> | What’s important to realize about grades is that they conflict with the goal of education. Law school grades are ranking metrics that serve employers, not students. The goal of education, meanwhile, is to help students grow. Law school is more than a vending machine that spits out job offers in exchange for tuition. |
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< | Introduction |
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> | The case against law school grades as they are |
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< | I was startled recently by the degree of attachment I felt towards grades. I tried to convince myself that I only saw grades as an instrument which could help me attain my goals. Earnestly reflecting on my beliefs, I discovered that grades were more intertwined with my sense of self-worth than I previously realized. |
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> | Law school grades provide an efficient and dehumanizing means for employers to categorize potential hires. Grades reduce people to numbers. Hiring is hardly holistic when grades operate as a threshold, not a parallel factor, to other qualifications.
Grading also assumes uniform input, uniform process, and uniform result. In other words, grades incentivize students to become assembly-line products who think and write the same.
The role of grades makes sense in the context of our capitalist economy, but much less so as an educative tool in law school. A single end-of-semester grade indicates neither progress nor improvement strategy. Further, considering the lack of attention that law professors devote to their students’ writing ability throughout the semester, an essay-style final exam scarcely makes sense.
Law school takes grading to an extreme. An emphasis on grades that begins from admission reinforces the artificial belief that grades are correlated to lawyering ability. Even assuming the correctness of this correlation, the law school curve is only a relative measure between individuals in one given class at one given time, having no objective generalizable value. The grading curve even harms employers, because there is no telling whether a class is entirely incompetent, and the A’s only slightly less so than the rest.
Additionally, grading on a curve negatively affects interpersonal attitudes. The curve is a zero-sum mechanism that discourages sharing and incentivizes opportunistic behavior like claiming disability accommodation to gain an edge on exams. Students see each other as competitors for a few top grades in each class, and potentially a few spots at a select firm.
Recently, grades even justified the use of force to oppress free speech from students. |
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< | The myth of grades as an inherent good |
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< | Under the pretense of being a shorthand for academic achievement, grades have in fact become the very good that students pursue. Unconsciously, students measure self-worth and relative worth to other students by their grades. In China’s education system, students are ranked by their test scores, with rankings publicly available within the class. Their rank therefore translates directly into their relative status among students in the class. The top-ranked student is glorified but scared that they will lose their place next time. Lower-ranking students will face higher scrutiny and pressure to improve from their family and teachers. The second- and third-place holders want to take the throne. Most of the time, they are asked to “improve their grades,” which presupposes that grades are themselves what is valuable, rather than the underlying academic achievement that grades may represent. |
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> | What can law schools realistically do instead? |
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< | One practical view that many Chinese parents adopt in fact does not dispute this proposition. This view concedes that grades are valuable because under China’s culminating annual entry exam for universities, a single grade determines one’s university and job prospects. |
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> | Throwing grades out the window is controversial, at least in the short term |
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< | The problem of demeaning education |
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> | Ungrading advocates argue that grades are not proper incentives for learning. Rather, students become fixated on the incentive and lose interest in learning itself. Students also avoid taking risks for fear of losing the incentive. Interest, they argue, is the only effective motivator in the long run.
Accordingly, the only form of evaluation should be critical feedback, not grades. Deemphasizing retrospective assessment alleviates mental health risks and fosters collaboration between peers, and between students and teachers. Focusing on future improvement preserves students’ interest and confidence.
But a practical concern haunts any law school seeking to adopt an ungraded or a pass/fail system. Without grades to communicate their social or professional worth to the outside world (disregard any underlying normative concerns for a moment), students might feel disadvantaged in the job market. Any individual institution or teacher that attempts to embrace innovative educational methods will face pushback. What transpired in Professor Moglen’s elective course this year is ample demonstration––but such efforts continue to press the need for grading reform. |
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< | Viewing grades as a inherent good has various problems. First, this view reduces the role of education to that of helping students obtain the best grades that they can. Thus, education has no other function apart from connecting students with a numerical identifier. The influence of such identifier on any individual is uncertain, unless we presume that the government which implements such an education system has corresponding mechanisms to ensure that grades do in fact perfectly correlate with future earnings or other outcomes. In that case, a flood of questions about equality and the integrity of the grading system would ensue. The absurdity of having years of education only to produce a numerical label is therefore apparent. |
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> | Grading more conscientiously |
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< | The problem of internalization |
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> | With the foregoing in mind, law schools are not likely to overhaul their grading systems anytime soon. Absent widespread institutional or societal change, law professors can nonetheless make incremental changes to alleviate the detriment of grades in three major areas. |
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< | One consequence of accepting that grades are valuable in themselves is what I term the problem of internalization. Students who are pressured continually to get better grades become gradually convinced that grades themselves are a goal worth pursuing, and come to forget what in the first place motivated them. Like hunger and thirst, grades become a need never satiated, never questioned, always driving students to want for more, and occupying their time and effort to the exclusion of other beneficial activities. After having internalized a need for better grades, students will unconsciously confirm and protect it as part of their belief system. Even in the rare instance where their assumption comes into challenge, ample explanations prevent the meaninglessness of grades from being exposed. |
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> | Set clear but not overly strict expectations |
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< | The overzealous pursuit of educational clout |
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> | Law professors should provide clear expectations about what constitutes good work in their class.
Lawyering is partly a subjective exercise: professors, much like judges, have their own preferences and track records. Professors can make grading less unpredictable and subjective, and thereby reduce anxiety, by publishing past exams and commentaries. Commentaries can also serve as additional opportunities to learn from and think critically about how a professor approaches legal issues.
Meanwhile, strict rubrics can encourage uniform, mindless writing that merely checks the boxes.
Indeed, the modern trend of legal writing seems to favor uniformity, as court opinions, briefs, and law school writing courses converge on the CREAC structure. But persuasive writing is inherently creative, and while clarity is important, overemphasis on form can obfuscate the significance of content. Thus, methodologies like CREAC should add to, not limit, students’ understanding of the law. An overly strict rubric will produce robots that only write in ChatGPT? style, not nimble advocates who can adapt to unique circumstances. |
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< | Relatedly, other metrics associated with education inspire internalization and cult-like worship similarly to grades. University rankings and international education are prominent examples. |
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> | Provide feedback and allow for improvement |
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< | Rankings are overwhelmingly used without consideration of their methodology and limits, but as a comprehensive indicator of value. Parents and students would feel compelled to pursue higher-ranked schools, not because the rankings correspond to some comparative benefit that they hoped to obtain, but simply due to the prestige attached to a number in a ranking list. This obsession is only exacerbated by companies that only hire from, for example, schools that rank within top 100 on QS. |
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> | Relatedly, professors should aim to provide individualized feedback, especially for major assignments. Doing so enables students to focus on potential areas of improvement rather than dwell cluelessly about what went wrong.
Most importantly, students should be able to improve their grade without penalty by revising their work. If grades are to promote learning, then allowing for improvement is the only proper way to structure the incentive. Granted, students may choose to revise merely to get a better grade, but the process of revision emphasizes work quality and leads to constructive exchanges between students and teachers. |
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< | The hunt for prestige similarly motivates parents who send their children overseas for school. My transfer to an international school in third grade, and decision to study in the US, stemmed from my parents’ belief at the time that China’s education system inhibited creativity and produced test-taking machines instead of independent thinkers. That may well be true. However, more parents in China send their children overseas simply because it appears fashionable to do so – the parents will be seen as open-minded, progressive, and wealthy enough to pay for expensive private schools abroad. Many parents and students care little about what the education entails. The student will be satisfied to return home after graduation with a foreign diploma and a degree which they had no interest whatsoever in. |
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> | Eliminate the curve |
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< | The pursuit of educational clout is a great waste of resources. The student’s precious time and effort go to waste, as well as significant amounts of wealth expended for these fancy endeavors. Tuition and living costs aside, parents pay handsomely for counselors who help craft application packages to enroll students in the most prestigious high schools and universities abroad. Not infrequently, these packages include fabricated experiences and essays to impress admissions offices. And many students with authentic application packages have been told to partake in activities in high school that they have little interest in, for the sole purpose of telling a unique, or appealing personal narrative. Of course, they also had to have straight As.
Conclusion
The deeply entrenched need to attach a grade to each stage of my life gave rise to regrets about not having attended a “better” university or law school. But more profoundly, I regret letting my fixation on grades override my curiosity and passion to learn on multiple occasions. An education system that demystifies external criteria and exposes them for being inherently valueless would enable more students to discover their interests earlier on rather than regret bygone opportunities after the fact.
Retrospective self-criticism is also a cultural trope. Let's see if we can, instead, point the draft at a mechanism of reform: having seen this, now what? What action can we take that will make necessary change? How do we break the patterns of the past?
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> | The necessary complement to a freely revisable grading system is the guarantee that everyone can potentially meet the most demanding expectations. Otherwise, the hierarchical and definitive nature of a curve will swallow up much of the learning incentive that revision opportunities create.
Abandoning the curve even benefits employers, who are looking for qualified individuals, not merely “more qualified” individuals within their class. Revision opportunities ensure that more students will acquire the requisite skills which they may not have demonstrated the first time around. The pool of hirable people will increase, and job competition will lessen to the benefit of students.
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> | These suggestions are merely building blocks. They will hopefully engage more students and educators in conversation about grading issues––any top-down reform in the future will require a concerted effort from all stakeholders. Lastly, in tandem with incremental changes, educators should seriously contemplate the pertinent and valuable arguments for ungrading as a long-term alternative. |
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