Should I adopt the credit-fail grading system?

-- By SamanthaWishman - 16 Feb 2012

Do you know what the curve is like?

I was an English major at a greed-is-good university where American Psycho was aspirational and “finance” was a pickup line. My mom liked to tell me I was living in the 80s.

The young captains of industry who went to the best undergraduate business program in the country often turned up their noses at those of us in the College of Arts and Sciences. They would scoff: Humanities! The College of Arts and Crafts! Do you know, they would ask with brass, what a Wharton curve is like?

I did not. I took two Wharton classes and refused to be graded in either of them for fear of subjecting my sensitive liberal arts soul to the monsters in the Tower of Greed (what English majors poetically called the business school).

One day before my 19th Century Satire class, a few students got to talking. We were tired of the degradation, tired of the name-calling. I hate it when they call them Mickey Mouse classes, we bemoaned. We wanted respect. I naively said we needed a curve.

What does the curve teach?

Class rankings encourage students to unquestioningly affirm the value and inevitability of competition and order. In describing the effect of curve grading in his article, “Law School as Training for Hierarchy,” Duncan Kennedy asserts that the process of subjecting students to a system of hierarchy and of student acquiescence to being placed in relation to each other assimilates graduates to future hierarchical systems.

We live in a country where the total assets of the top 400 people equal the assets of the bottom 140 million people, where 46.2 million people live in poverty, and where the imbalance between college completion by rich and poor students has grown over 50% since the 1980s. In the heat of media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the young captains of industry chanted in the lobby of the Tower of Greed: Get a job. Occupy Occupy Wall Street. We are the 1%. I wonder how much the teachings of the curve helped to justify this position.

The question of who or what is ranked higher is not a useful one to ask if you are trying to create a community where innovative thinking and problem solving can take place.

For what do we educate?

Kennedy argues that curved grading is unnecessary if the goal of legal education is to provide high quality legal services. A reallocation of resources could provide a majority of law students with the technical proficiency that only a minority of students currently receive. When I was visiting law school admissions programs, students and administration explained why the curve was necessary: so employers will know how to differentiate us. If that is the end, then the curve is the means.

Should law school administrators and professors prepare us for the world as it is or to change it?

How do I best learn?

After my first semester at law school the curve told me that my exam performance was average to below average in a pool of above-average students. The grades I got didn’t help me learn, but perhaps higher grades next semester would give me assurance of progress, in case I couldn’t see progress on my own.

I did not know until reading Harry’s essay that we can opt out of grading through J.D. Rule 3.1.2. What would be the impact of not subjecting myself to evaluations by professors on exams? Would a firm look down on me for opting out of grades-- either suspicious that the grades were bad or suspicious of a wayward soul? If they didn’t appreciate my decision, is that somewhere I would want to work? In terms of my own education, I could no longer be motivated by the hope of affirmation that follows feelings of superiority that the curve can provide. I imagine that I would be a happy and liberated law student, or at least have one less reason not to be.

Is opting out of curved grading freedom? Or, does freedom come from learning how to transcend grades and ranking? That could be a useful lesson. If law school is a test of the imagination, perhaps grades are part of the test.

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