Thinking on the curve

-- NicoleMorote - 06 May 2023

The logic behind law school exams being the way they are has been really bugging me for the past few days, and I wanted to see if anyone might be feeling the same way.

I had my first exam of the semester yesterday - it was a tough one by all accounts, even relative to others my section has taken; I was satisfied with my preparation, but when push came to shove, I really did just run out of time. Since then, my friends and I have been commiserating nonstop about how difficult it was, and feeling time pressures on the exam doesn't seem to have been a unique experience. There's a sense of camaraderie in the communal struggle; commiserating about the time pressures and the intricacies of the exam feels, as a student in my 18th "grade" of education, to be nothing new.

What's really been frustrating me is in how much instinct there seems to be in reveling in that others, too, feel shaky about their performance on the exam. I have to persuade myself not to feel relieved - maybe encouraged - that others, too, are beating themselves up. Maybe if everyone feels demoralized, I can feel good, right?

But it feels kind of disgusting to have that instinct - and I think the curve is largely to blame.

The mandatory curve on which 1L classes are graded means that, if I struggled on the exam and everyone else said it wasn't so bad, their success would actively make it harder - maybe impossible - for me to do well. The incentives to hope that others do poorly are baked into the cake. Referring to it as pressures catalyzed by "the curve" honestly starts to feel like a euphemism the more you do it; it is a requirement that, at least based on our academic results, only so many of us can do well.

And it seems like we're all on the same page, for the most part, about that exam grades are largely arbitrary; that they are in no way reflective of our intelligence; that they are little more than one of the legal fictions we subscribe to keep the system chugging along in all its imperfection, instead of meaningfully examining it and daring to think of something better. The existence of a mandatory curve would seem to suggest some awareness of the fictitiousness of forcing every class, across every year, along a narrow subset of "preapproved grade distributions." Surely, even the decision-makers who impose the curve would admit that a B+ student by one metric could have just as easily been an A- student in a different class, or with a different professor, or if they'd enrolled one year prior.

And yet, some employers will require us to be in the top half of the class, or note their requirement of a 3.5+ GPA (including the Federal Reserve Board, if you're curious). Alternatively, they may not say it out loud, but leave it open to interpretation in data like the "offer by honors" spreadsheet we received a few weeks ago.

The system creates unnecessary hostility. It creates a widespread reluctance about sharing resources; if everyone gets my very good and comprehensive outline, maybe no one benefits from it - if everyone uses it, maybe it just marginally improves answers across the board - and the curve remains the curve. It creates understandable sensitivity and hurt feelings from the frenzied answers-comparing that happens with your friends, or with the person next to you demanding to know whether you also applied strict scrutiny to hypothetical number five.

Certainly, other forces feed into this: the natural neurosis of us as law students is hardly blameless. But what truly prevents us building a culture where we collaborate meaningfully - and root for each other's successes meaningfully - is the curve.

On a personal level, I've been trying to combat this feeling by focusing on what law school ideeally might focus on. I really have learned so much over the past nine months; it's unreal to think of how far we've all come since starting our first classes. Concepts that at once felt impossible to understand are now in my lexicon - maybe with some uncertainty - but it's something, and it wasn't there before. I don't just mean the cases and the facts and the little flowcharts that explain what is and isn't a defeasible fee; in fact, I'm not referring to those things at all.

If anything, I mean skills it sometimes feels like we picked up by accident. I'm talking about the training in understanding the real-world consequences and the human impacts of the lofty academic theories; the nights staring at the "facts" in the criminal law textbook and knowing that, for all we know, the truth is far from what became crystallized in the law; the Googling "Kelo New London aftermath" and learning about the terrible consequences of what lessons often sanitize. This may not have been its intended effect, but law school has kept me in practice to tuning in to questioning the way things are. This is what I find some solace in, as we slog through another finals season - and I hope that we can all find some comfort in the amount we've grown.