Grades?

If you're a law student: When did you get your grades?

I ask because at GW, we're going to get our grades today. Yes, today—a full three weeks after the semester began. That seems pretty late to me, and pretty disrespectful on GW's part. It's as if the school is saying: "We know you got almost zero feedback last semester and you'd really like to know how you did so you can start figuring out how to do better, but, well, too bad for you!" But perhaps its standard practice for law schools to wait to release grades until everyone has already accepted their loan checks and made a fairly significant commitment to the spring semester—great business practice! At least we know where these schools' priorities lie.*

Whatever. We'll get our grades today, so yesterday ProfCivPro gave us three reasons to keep grades in perspective:

1. They're 1st semester grades. You've got lots of time to improve.
2. They are only grades. Grades are not an accurate reflection of intelligence, knowledge, or capability; they're simply the only thing we've come up with that's workable.
3. The Big Picture: Keep in mind that a few weeks from now, your grades won't seem very significant, nor are they significant compared with the rest of your life.

All helpful advice. But the trouble is really on point 2. Yes, they're only grades, but do prospective employers realize that? Some do, but I'm sure some don't. Knowing that some employers weed out potential candidates on the basis of GPA alone makes the "grades don't really mean anything" argument a bit less persuasive.

Still, point 2 is absolutely correct: Grades are very close to meaningless. As a teacher, I tried to find ways to avoid giving grades at all, but that wasn't really possible in a school that required me to fill out grading bubble-sheets at the end of every semester, thereby reducing everything my students had done for three months to a single letter. The best I could come up with was a self-grading system that I won't go into here. A lot of very smart people have made a lot of very smart arguments about the evils of grades and have proposed much better systems of evaluation that would give students better feedback, and thereby do more to help them learn. These systems would also give employers or anyone else who cared to look at the evaluations a much better idea of the student's strengths and weaknesses. But such systems are not "efficient," they take time, and in our system, we care less about quality than we do about quantity. Reduce everything to numbers, then we can crunch them and compare them and make fast, simple decisions with zero thought or meaning! Yay!

* "Law school" is perhaps a misnomer; "law business" or "J.D. factory" would probably be more appropriate. Also, I anticipate that anyone wishing to defend GW or law schools who release grades late generally will argue that law profs grade their own exams, and they each have 100 students or more, and it just takes time. All true. But to me that's just another argument for smaller classes and perhaps for longer breaks between semesters.

Posted 06:34 AM | Comments (15) | law school