The Law School Grading System

-- By PaulaKim - 16 Feb 2012

Is it a good one?

The grades we receive in law school are supposedly a reflection of how much we know, and perhaps also of how well we will do as lawyer. Yet they are generally determined by how we perform on one final exam that is written by the professor. This is a poor system for several reasons. First of all, it does not measure the skills we will need to use as lawyers. When will we ever have to answer theoretical legal questions within four hours without the use of the Internet and colleagues? Collaboration is a large part of legal work, as is using computers to do research, yet we are denied access to these two tools on an exam that is supposed to tell us whether or not we will be successful as lawyers. Secondly, this system discourages the development of characteristics that Eben stresses are important for lawyers to have: judgment and creativity. These exams are meant to test judgment because we have to spot the most important issues and decide which ones to focus on in our answers. But what really happens is that instead of writing about the issues we judge are important, we write about those we think the professor thinks is important. Those who best predict what the professor wants get the best grades. And those whose answers deviate from what the professor expects are rewarded for their efforts to exercise independent judgment with a lower grade.

How do you know this? How many exams have you reviewed to see what grades they got, and how do you know whether the grades they got were determined by the degree of accord with the professors' expectations?

What seems evident to you does not seem evident to me, whether as a person who spent parts of five years taking law school exams, or parts of fifteen other years grading them. I never approached a law school exam asking myself what the teacher expected, let alone wanted. Most of the time I wrote essays in the bluebooks which contained at least one point, usually the most important, which I was as sure as could be the teacher did not expect. Often I wrote something with which I was pretty sure the teacher would disagree; I considered that to be insurance. Experience showed me most often that I was right.

As a teacher, facing piles of bluebooks saying the same things in the same tones, full of the same mistakes, the same naivetes and the same graceless prose, what I wanted more than anything else was originality, flair, mastery, self-confidence, and a strong point of view. In my opinion, you know the formula for a B+, but you have lost track of how to get an A.

This system teaches us that thinking for ourselves is bad and that adopting the viewpoints of others is good.

Only if that's what you want to learn.

How can we learn to be creative lawyers when, to do well in law school, we just need to parrot the ideas of our professors? Finally, this system gives us one shot to show how much we learned over one semester. There is no way to measure improvement or effort. It seems unfair to disregard three months of work in favor of the answers we give on a four hour exam.

Do we really need to know our grades?

Still, grades are a pervasive part of a law student’s job search. Many employers require transcripts and want to hire only those with the best grades. Even if we reject the notion that grades matter, those for whom we want to work will not.

Once again, as a lawyer who hires lawyers, I know this is nonsense. I hire all the time: I've hired more than two dozen lawyers and law students in the last seven years. Though as a teacher I live among transcripts, as a hiring lawyer I've never looked at a transcript once. For deciding what lawyers I want to work with, grades are absolutely useless.

Large firms that don't choose lawyers, but just purchase canned meat by the case, use transcripts. Not because they help lawyers to choose who to work with, but because they make bureaucracy possible. After the cans full of meat are opened, partners and senior associates quickly figure out whom they want to send work to, and whom they want to leave strictly alone. They don't use transcripts to sort the meatballs out, I assure you.

But is it necessary for us to know what our grades are? When Eben told us his views on this question, my first thought was “I completely disagree.” Although I think grades are not necessarily a reflection of ability, the reality is that in most cases, to get a clerkship or a prestigious firm job one must have a strong transcript. And so seeing what our grades are gives us a relatively accurate prediction of who will hire us, or at least who will not hire us. We can then tailor our job search to focus on the employers who are likeliest to give us an offer and not waste our time applying for jobs we have no chance of getting. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this approach works only if we are looking for a job. Not our dream job, or a job that makes us happy, or a job that is fulfilling, but simply a job.

Indeed. In short, if you have decided to kill off your practice.

So assuming we are all looking to get a job we actually want, rather than just somewhere to work, do we still need to know what our grades are?

No. Your problem is precisely the same no matter what: how to convince the people you want to work with that they want to work with you.

If our grades are low, being cognizant of this fact might discourage us from applying for our dream job. It might cause us to give up before we even try. However, it might also be motivational. As Eben pointed out, there are other ways to get jobs besides having good grades. Perhaps seeing our grades would spur us to go out and do every possible thing to make the connections necessary to get that dream job. Perhaps we would work harder to have the perfect writing sample and perfect our interview skills. But if we are applying to our dream job, shouldn’t we be doing this anyway, despite what our grades are? Why do we let such a trivial thing as grades be a determinant of our actions? I still don’t know how I feel about this issue. I think knowing or not knowing our grades should have the same effect. We should still apply for the jobs we want and work extra hard to get the ones we really want. But I think we all have a tendency to base our self-worth on the grades we get and maybe knowing our grades just perpetuates this potentially destructive way of viewing the world and ourselves.

How can we change it?

Is there anything we can do to change the system? Honestly, I think it’s too late for us.

Read SamanthaWishmanFirstPaper. Meditate on Rule 3.1.2 of the Rules for the JD Degree at this law school. Cultivate creativity. Stop bullshitting yourself.

We are stuck in a system built by our predecessors and have little say in the matter. Even if there are law students who want things to change, there are so many more who accept the status quo. Also, employers have all of the power right now. There are too many law students and too few jobs to go around. We are not in a position to create meaningful change. So should we just sit back and let this system exist, simply because it has always existed? Should we be complacent and play by the rules, even those we don’t agree with? Yes, for now. But maybe one day, once we rise to positions of actual power, once we have more control over lives, when we are partners in law firms, or law professors, or judges, we will remember the discussions we had in this class. Maybe by then we will have the strength and power to examine the system and fix what is broken. It may be too late for us, but we can still affect change for future generations.

You need to shorten your paragraphs. Your sentences are blowsy and repetitive too, but when you shorten the grafs and tighten the outline, the badly-framed sentences will stick out like unhammered nails and you'll deal with them. Other comments above.