How Law Schools can Grade More Conscientiously

-- By ZongweiHu - 23 May 2025

What’s important to realize about grades is that they conflict with the goal of education. Law school grades are ranking metrics that serve employers, not students. The goal of education, meanwhile, is to help students grow. Law school is more than a vending machine that spits out job offers in exchange for tuition.

The case against law school grades as they are

Law school grades provide an efficient and dehumanizing means for employers to categorize potential hires. Grades reduce people to numbers. Hiring is hardly holistic when grades operate as a threshold, not a parallel factor, to other qualifications. Grading also assumes uniform input, uniform process, and uniform result. In other words, grades incentivize students to become assembly-line products who think and write the same. The role of grades makes sense in the context of our capitalist economy, but much less so as an educative tool in law school. A single end-of-semester grade indicates neither progress nor improvement strategy. Further, considering the lack of attention that law professors devote to their students’ writing ability throughout the semester, an essay-style final exam scarcely makes sense. Law school takes grading to an extreme. An emphasis on grades that begins from admission reinforces the artificial belief that grades are correlated to lawyering ability. Even assuming the correctness of this correlation, the law school curve is only a relative measure between individuals in one given class at one given time, having no objective generalizable value. The grading curve even harms employers, because there is no telling whether a class is entirely incompetent, and the A’s only slightly less so than the rest. Additionally, grading on a curve negatively affects interpersonal attitudes. The curve is a zero-sum mechanism that discourages sharing and incentivizes opportunistic behavior like claiming disability accommodation to gain an edge on exams. Students see each other as competitors for a few top grades in each class, and potentially a few spots at a select firm. Recently, grades even justified the use of force to oppress free speech from students.

What can law schools realistically do instead?

Throwing grades out the window is controversial, at least in the short term

Ungrading advocates argue that grades are not proper incentives for learning. Rather, students become fixated on the incentive and lose interest in learning itself. Students also avoid taking risks for fear of losing the incentive. Interest, they argue, is the only effective motivator in the long run. Accordingly, the only form of evaluation should be critical feedback, not grades. Deemphasizing retrospective assessment alleviates mental health risks and fosters collaboration between peers, and between students and teachers. Focusing on future improvement preserves students’ interest and confidence. But a practical concern haunts any law school seeking to adopt an ungraded or a pass/fail system. Without grades to communicate their social or professional worth to the outside world (disregard any underlying normative concerns for a moment), students might feel disadvantaged in the job market. Any individual institution or teacher that attempts to embrace innovative educational methods will face pushback. What transpired in Professor Moglen’s elective course this year is ample demonstration––but such efforts continue to press the need for grading reform.

Grading more conscientiously

With the foregoing in mind, law schools are not likely to overhaul their grading systems anytime soon. Absent widespread institutional or societal change, law professors can nonetheless make incremental changes to alleviate the detriment of grades in three major areas.

Set clear but not overly strict expectations

Law professors should provide clear expectations about what constitutes good work in their class. Lawyering is partly a subjective exercise: professors, much like judges, have their own preferences and track records. Professors can make grading less unpredictable and subjective, and thereby reduce anxiety, by publishing past exams and commentaries. Commentaries can also serve as additional opportunities to learn from and think critically about how a professor approaches legal issues. Meanwhile, strict rubrics can encourage uniform, mindless writing that merely checks the boxes. Indeed, the modern trend of legal writing seems to favor uniformity, as court opinions, briefs, and law school writing courses converge on the CREAC structure. But persuasive writing is inherently creative, and while clarity is important, overemphasis on form can obfuscate the significance of content. Thus, methodologies like CREAC should add to, not limit, students’ understanding of the law. An overly strict rubric will produce robots that only write in ChatGPT? style, not nimble advocates who can adapt to unique circumstances.

Provide feedback and allow for improvement

Relatedly, professors should aim to provide individualized feedback, especially for major assignments. Doing so enables students to focus on potential areas of improvement rather than dwell cluelessly about what went wrong. Most importantly, students should be able to improve their grade without penalty by revising their work. If grades are to promote learning, then allowing for improvement is the only proper way to structure the incentive. Granted, students may choose to revise merely to get a better grade, but the process of revision emphasizes work quality and leads to constructive exchanges between students and teachers.

Eliminate the curve

The necessary complement to a freely revisable grading system is the guarantee that everyone can potentially meet the most demanding expectations. Otherwise, the hierarchical and definitive nature of a curve will swallow up much of the learning incentive that revision opportunities create. Abandoning the curve even benefits employers, who are looking for qualified individuals, not merely “more qualified” individuals within their class. Revision opportunities ensure that more students will acquire the requisite skills which they may not have demonstrated the first time around. The pool of hirable people will increase, and job competition will lessen to the benefit of students.

---

These suggestions are merely building blocks. They will hopefully engage more students and educators in conversation about grading issues––any top-down reform in the future will require a concerted effort from all stakeholders. Lastly, in tandem with incremental changes, educators should seriously contemplate the pertinent and valuable arguments for ungrading as a long-term alternative.

---

You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, ZongweiHu
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.