David, I read that article and was quite surprised. I also share the same hopes with you about law school grades becoming less relevant, but I am not optimistic. Mohit mentioned the false sense of security that students "with higher alphabets" may be tempted to develop. I completely agree; we are so often told that good grades are a golden ticket to the most elite levels of the practice. However, good grades don't prevent this from happening to you, which is only but one of many examples we've heard about. This, in my opinion, is the larger issue and the reason that legal employers will always hold the trump card. We are pumping a supply of lawyers into the market every year that far outpaces the demand. Unlike the medical profession, which provides a supply of new doctors each year that keeps pace with market demands, the legal profession refuses to do so. In the end, though, we are in a better position than many of our counterparts, which is a somewhat disturbing proposition.

I also think grades give employers a false sense of security: a (sometimes unfounded) belief that they have won the lottery in luring the most intelligent, hardest working, and capable young lawyers to their organizations. However, given the arbitrary nature of grades, and sometimes sheer luck associated with them, it is hard to see why intelligent, hard working, and capable hiring partners would rely on them in this way. As Professor Wu wrote in his post-exam memo, the difference between a good and the best exam were not that great. Given this, as David suggested, one would think that grades would be one aspect of a more holistic assessment of the student as opposed to, in many cases, the sole determinant. Until this happens, I think it is and will continue to be employers' loss.

-- JenniferGreen - 28 Jun 2010

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-- MohitGourisaria - 27 Jun 2010

I think the second argument holds true for law school grades as well. The more that we tinker with them, either by imposing and changing artificial curves or by just adding points to GPAs to make students "more competitive" in the job market, the less meaningful they get. The title valedictorian was once one that was given to just one student, the top in the class. Now, it is impossible to tell what it means. If a 6.5% of a high school class gets the title valedictorian (as at one of the high schools mentioned in the article), the meaning of the term has completely changed. And as a result, people will give it less deference.

My main hope is that the media coverage of repeated changes to law school grading systems eventually induces people to rely less on law school grades. Right now, many judges and employers use them as a way of ranking students against each other. If they are unstable, as they appear to be, they can no longer be relied upon to do this. Hopefully more and more people will recognize this and will consider the applicants themselves for clerkships and positions as opposed to meaningless numbers, rankings and honors.

-- DavidGoldin - 27 Jun 2010

I don't think the news here is about grade inflation as such. What's happened is just that few schools who had a lower curve adjusted it to match the curve of the majority of other law schools. I don't support the curve system, but I don't see a particular problem with fixing a situation in which student X, if he had gone to UC Hastings, would have gotten a higher mark for precisely the same performance than if he had gone to Loyola. It's relevant to consider curves at other law schools because students are not just competing amongst their classmates for jobs, they are also competing with graduates of other schools.

I am not convinced that Harvard, Yale and Stanford have gotten their evaluation systems right. A system that goes from A-B-C to HP-P-LP is not going very far. That being said, getting rid of the arbitrariness of pluses and minuses is a positive step. I think also that in some marginal sense, a terminology based on "pass" feels different from one based on the A-B-C system.

I think the larger issue at stake, as I've intimated above, is not actually how we're graded - it's about what law school is. I think the "industrial model," which requires large class sizes to finance the salaries of a large number of professors, which in turn produce a large amount of "prestigious" law review articles, is unsustainable. It fosters alienation and militates against the types of pedagogical relationships that build great lawyers. When new graduates could make hundreds of dollars per hour sitting in a high-rise and highlighting documents, this type of education may have been sufficient. I don't think it is any more.

My understanding of the reason that Columbia does not have a pass-based system is that students recently rejected it. I would like to know more about this, if anyone has any information about what the margin was, how the question was put, etc. In a sense, however, we have the education we have asked for.

Some links related to that debate:

Katherine Franke's blog post [expressing concern that women and minority students may still be disadvantaged if faculty relationships, not grades, become the new coin of the realm]

Columbia Spectator article [reporting on the debate, quotes Franke's post]

Finally, with respect to the Times Most Emailed section, it is relevant to note that an article on "Catios" also enjoyed a multi-day stretch as "most emailed" article in recent weeks.

-- DevinMcDougall - 26 Jun 2010