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TaylorKelsonFirstEssay 3 - 09 May 2017 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Casual Empiricism in Law School Grades | | | The law school should publish annual reports of anonymized, aggregate grade distributions. It should undertake its own analysis in order to convince itself and its students that grades do not capture characteristics thought to be irrelevant to the exercise, such as race or gender after control for other measures of aptitude and prior educational achievement. | |
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Grade distributions are already controlled in the aggregate by "the
curve," which supposedly deals with the non-problem of "grade
inflation" and which actually serves to keep issues you are trying
to raise permanently at bay. So there's nothing to see here,
because the distributions look alike. Faculty lore, which has some
empirical support, claims that exams are good because they reduce
the tendency to grade differentially on "resembles me" bases when
papers and other non-anonymous forms of evaluation are employed.
| | | Further, the law school should actively undertake experiments with the grading methodology by grading with experimental systems on a test basis, side-by-side with the traditional system. It should examine the consequences of a less discretized scale, of more emphasis on subjective feedback, and of giving more transcript weight to research, writing, and advocacy activities, to name a few. It should examine the efficacy of these and other alternative metrics, both on promoting learning in law school and predicting success afterwards. | |
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This confuses methods of grading with methods of evaluation. You
want to be more precise about that, because grading isn't very
interesting or important, but how learning is evaluated has very
important effects on learning indeed.
It doesn't matter in context, however, because "the law school" won't
experiment in any way at all. Individual teachers have power to
experiment, which by and large they don't use.
| | | Conclusion
I pose no principled objection to grading as a concept. I would also have no principled objection to assigning grades by lottery, but once word got out that this was the system, grades would cease to be taken seriously overnight. Assigning gradated marks of quality implies that the distinctions between those marks are meaningful. The burden is rightfully on the one doing the assigning to prove it. | |
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As we've talked about this draft already, I don't think that my
overall editorial advice needs to be repeated here. There are some
additional places where the existing argument can and should be
tightened, as I have tried to suggest above.
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