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Grade Explosion
Glorfindel of Gondolin dares to post his 1L grades—and gets kicked around for it in the comments. Yikes.
One of the more thoughtful commenters writes:
I've always considered that grades in law school (or any school) are like salaries at an office. You can bitch about them, talk about them in vague terms, but it's just impolite to talk about them. Why? Because the next guy might be doing the same job, just as well, but getting less money (for whatever reason). It's not fair, it's life, and it's polite just to leave that stuff off limits.
But see, this is the problem. So long as we keep salaries and grades secret, relegated to the realm of the "impolite" and the "personal," they'll retain their power over us. The issue of talking about income is the best example: We try to pretend that how much money we make doesn't matter, that we live in a classless society, that we're all middle class, etc. But rather than helping smooth social differences or improve our society in some other way, this willed ignorance about the huge income inequalities in the U.S. simply acts as a screen to hide the brutal effects of those inequalities from our collective "middle class" consciousness. We don't need to worry about poor people, because we're all middle class, right? And so long as we make sure we don't talk about income, we can also be sure our little "middle class" fantasy remains intact. Yay.
Grades work a little differently, I think, but they do seem to be much more powerful and influential as dark secrets we hide than they would be as bits of information we openly share. I suspect that the people who most fiercely refuse to discuss grades are those to whom they mean the most, either because those people have really high or really low grades, and either very proud or very ashamed of those grades. As with income, so with grades—the people on the extremes fear they have something to hide. If you have top grades, you don't want to tell because you're afraid people will think you're bragging, or that people will expect more from you, or that people will be afraid of you or more competitive with you or whatever. If you have bottom grades, you don't want to tell because you're afraid people will think you're stupid, they won't want to talk with you or study with you, they'll be unable to take anything you say seriously, etc.
But imagine a scenario where everyone gets their grades and then freely discusses them. Wouldn't that drain all the power from those little symbols? Wouldn't that show the world that grades are just stupid letters? Wouldn't that make law students collectively seem much smarter, much more mature, much more wise, showing that they understand that those letters have a huge arbitrary component and exist for one rotten thing only, namely, to divide law students into different brackets for employers to choose from? And most of all, wouldn't it show all those people on the top and bottom that nobody really cares half as much about their grades as they do?
Maybe. Maybe not. But after the rhetorical trouncing Carey got for publishing his grades, I'm less optimistic that people are ready to give it a try.
Posted January 30, 2004 05:19 AM | law school
I'm so with you.
But I'd like to point out that Carey's rhetorical trouncing, so to speak, was conducted almost entirely by anonymous posters. The people who say who they are have nothing to fear.
Posted by: Heidi at January 30, 2004 05:33 AM
Agh, too early. I meant, "the people who say who they are were generally nice."
Posted by: Heidi at January 30, 2004 05:34 AM
I agree with most of what you say in your post; the only thing I'd dispute is the general tone of the comments I've received. It seems to me that most of them are friendly, or funny, or helpful, or all of the above.
One of the reasons I posted my grades was to argue that posting them wouldn't matter all that much. Even though that post has gotten a lot of comments, I believe it's true that discussing grades really isn't the big deal that it sometimes seems to be.
But I agree with you that it can help, occasionally, to just talk about grades. Otherwise they can take on some weird significance that isn't warranted...
Posted by: Carey at January 30, 2004 08:04 AM
I'm going to side with secrecy. People don't talk about their grades to dismiss any "silly" ideas of the importance of them; they do it to see where they stand and, hopefully, get some compliments. Personally, I spoke about my 1L grades with one person (and only because we both felt the need to tell someone). It's true, I didn't talk about them for a lot of the reasons that have already been discussed.
Admittedly, I have talked about grades more this year, but only with my closest friends. It isn't that grades lost their mystique, but as you progress through law school, it simply gets easier to tell what kind of grades other people got because of indicators that everyone can see: interviews, job offers, journals, clerkships, etc.
Unfortunately, talking about grades wouldn't render them powerless. However arbitrary they may be, employers will certainly base their hiring practices on them for what promises to be the rest of time. It's kind of like hoping that talking openly about salaries will change them. Nope, some people will still make more money than others, maybe even for doing the same job, and no amount of openness will change the fact that depending on the wage disparity someone (while not necessarily having a better life) will be much more provided for. Some things really are just better left unsaid.
BTW, how does everyone get up and post at 5 am?
Posted by: Sam at January 30, 2004 08:46 AM
My guess is by not going to bed. That's generally the factor behind my 5AM posts. :)
Posted by: A. Rickey at January 30, 2004 09:20 AM
Since I'm the one who posted at 5 AM here, I'll point out that it was 6:30 my time. :) As for how I get up, well, 8 AM Civ Pro on Friday morning....
Posted by: Heidi at January 30, 2004 11:50 AM
Maybe my friends (and me) are weird, but we talk about salaries. We talked about them after undergrad; we talked about them after grad school; we talk about climbing the GS ladder, and the ones in the private sector talk about their bonuses, etc. I have a pretty firm idea of how much most of my friends make, within a reasonable variance.
Posted by: justin at January 30, 2004 05:34 PM
And from where I sit- NOTHING will make law students more mature or less neurotic.
Posted by: justin at January 30, 2004 05:35 PM
This is true.
Posted by: Sam at January 30, 2004 06:40 PM
Yeah, trying to make law students more mature/less neurotic would probably be wishful thinking.
5 a.m. posts: Welcome to life with my dog. She's actually very sweet, but she just loves to drag me out of bed at 4-5 a.m. But you know what Ben Franklin said: Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man cranky, irritable, and stupid.
Posted by: ambimb at January 30, 2004 08:01 PM
