The Arbitrary Nature of First Year Grades
This post over at Two-Timing the Cosmos made me think about law school grades. A common complaint is that grades in law school are arbitary. I think the way law school is set up makes people think this way, but I don't think first year grades are really that arbitrary (Except for my property class. But that was messed up, as it was not a traditional law school exam).
One of the most common arguments used in support of the proposition that first year grades are arbitrary is the "I studied a lot for class X, and didn't study at all for class Y, yet I received a better grade in class Y."
This argument forgets one crucial point about law school: The Curve. The curve doesn't care how much you know. The curve only cares about how much you know relative to the other people in your section.
Example: The first final I took was Contracts. I had two weeks plus Thanksgiving break to study for it. I crammed, and crammed, I had my Farnsworth book committed to memory, and my outline was flawless. I did every practice exam in the library, and half of the ones on the Harvard online exam bank. On game day I was pumped. I went in there, and wrote non-stop for 4 hours, nailing issue after issue. Then came torts, my last final of first semester. I had three days to get ready for it. I didn't know anything. I crammed for 72 hours, finished my outline at 10pm the night before the test, looked at the one practice test the prof gave us, and went to sleep. I went into the test scared, because I knew I didn't know the material that well. I sat down, resigned to take my beating. I wrote for three hours. Then I ran out of things to say. I sat there in panicky silence for about an hour, trying to find more issues. I couldn't. Time was called and that was that.
I got the same grade on both exams, despite my objectively poor performance in torts relative to contracts. The thing is though, everyone performed poorly in torts, because we only had three days to get ready for it. You don't have to beat the exam, you just have to beat your classmates. You can write a crappy exam, so long as theirs are crappier. You can also write an awesome exam, and nail 95% of the issues on it, but if your average classmate gets 97% of the issues, you're still walking away with a C.
You can also "know" more than your classmates and still walk away with an average (or worse) grade. A person in my section knew Crim up and down. He had every common law rule down pat, and knew the MPC cold. On test day, I think (and he agrees) he committed the law school exam version of seppuku: He was conclusory. He knew the material so well, that his conclusions seemed obvious, so he didn't bother explaining how he got there. He stated a conclusion, and didn't leave an analysis to support it. All of his conclusions were technically correct, but he lost all the points for the analysis (which was a majority of the available points).
Another reason I don't think grades are arbitrary is that some people consistently get A's, while others consistently get C's (although this could simply be evidence that grades aren't arbitrary at the margins, but still leaves open the question of whether or not they are for the middle of the pack). If grades were truly arbitrary, everyone would eventually end up with a smattering of a's b's and c's, and regress (or rise) to the median.
So, I don't really think grades are "arbitrary," but I think it's easy to see why people think they are. I DO think that grades are arbitrary in the sense that they don't test what they're supposed to (a student's ability to practice law), they are horrible at that (if there are any readers who have ever had to solve a complicated legal question without access to a law library or a westlaw account in less than 4 hours, please feel free to correct me). But I don't think they're arbitrary in the sense that they're randomly assigned.
All of this is based on my very narrow experience as a 1L. I haven't had uncurved upper level courses yet, or writing intensive courses that aren't blindly graded. Please feel free to correct/add thoughts/throw stones, etc.
One of the most common arguments used in support of the proposition that first year grades are arbitrary is the "I studied a lot for class X, and didn't study at all for class Y, yet I received a better grade in class Y."
This argument forgets one crucial point about law school: The Curve. The curve doesn't care how much you know. The curve only cares about how much you know relative to the other people in your section.
Example: The first final I took was Contracts. I had two weeks plus Thanksgiving break to study for it. I crammed, and crammed, I had my Farnsworth book committed to memory, and my outline was flawless. I did every practice exam in the library, and half of the ones on the Harvard online exam bank. On game day I was pumped. I went in there, and wrote non-stop for 4 hours, nailing issue after issue. Then came torts, my last final of first semester. I had three days to get ready for it. I didn't know anything. I crammed for 72 hours, finished my outline at 10pm the night before the test, looked at the one practice test the prof gave us, and went to sleep. I went into the test scared, because I knew I didn't know the material that well. I sat down, resigned to take my beating. I wrote for three hours. Then I ran out of things to say. I sat there in panicky silence for about an hour, trying to find more issues. I couldn't. Time was called and that was that.
I got the same grade on both exams, despite my objectively poor performance in torts relative to contracts. The thing is though, everyone performed poorly in torts, because we only had three days to get ready for it. You don't have to beat the exam, you just have to beat your classmates. You can write a crappy exam, so long as theirs are crappier. You can also write an awesome exam, and nail 95% of the issues on it, but if your average classmate gets 97% of the issues, you're still walking away with a C.
You can also "know" more than your classmates and still walk away with an average (or worse) grade. A person in my section knew Crim up and down. He had every common law rule down pat, and knew the MPC cold. On test day, I think (and he agrees) he committed the law school exam version of seppuku: He was conclusory. He knew the material so well, that his conclusions seemed obvious, so he didn't bother explaining how he got there. He stated a conclusion, and didn't leave an analysis to support it. All of his conclusions were technically correct, but he lost all the points for the analysis (which was a majority of the available points).
Another reason I don't think grades are arbitrary is that some people consistently get A's, while others consistently get C's (although this could simply be evidence that grades aren't arbitrary at the margins, but still leaves open the question of whether or not they are for the middle of the pack). If grades were truly arbitrary, everyone would eventually end up with a smattering of a's b's and c's, and regress (or rise) to the median.
So, I don't really think grades are "arbitrary," but I think it's easy to see why people think they are. I DO think that grades are arbitrary in the sense that they don't test what they're supposed to (a student's ability to practice law), they are horrible at that (if there are any readers who have ever had to solve a complicated legal question without access to a law library or a westlaw account in less than 4 hours, please feel free to correct me). But I don't think they're arbitrary in the sense that they're randomly assigned.
All of this is based on my very narrow experience as a 1L. I haven't had uncurved upper level courses yet, or writing intensive courses that aren't blindly graded. Please feel free to correct/add thoughts/throw stones, etc.
posted by Snubligent at 2:01 AM
6 Comments:
Well written, I appreciate the response, and if I went to a different school, I might agree with you. However, my school doesn't curve grades. In fact, your statement: "If grades were truly arbitrary, everyone would eventually end up with a smattering of a's b's and c's, and regress (or rise) to the median." This is exactly what happened at my school. The difference between the top 75%-20% ranked students is a difference of three tenths of a grade point. My GPA went down two hundredths this semester and I slipped down twenty percent in the rankings because of it. We all have virtually the same smattering grades.
I think your point is probably true about certain people consistently getting A's and other's getting C's, but that's usually a small fraction of students. For 80% of us, you could walk into class ranked 90/100 and walk out ranked 15/100 without knowing hardly anything more than the person next to you.
I could also tell you 10 stories about whacked out profs and their grading systems. I had a CivPro professor first year who proclaimed the first day of class, "I give students the lowest grade of their law school careers, and I'm proud of it." I swear to god. To this day I still think CP must be my worst subject because it was my worst grade - except that I was thankful I didn't get one of the significant number of F's and D's he handed out. Let me tell you something, there was no significant number of people who knew so little about Civ Pro to get a D or F. Between him and our messed up Property prof, my section had much lower GPAs than the other sections, but since they rank us all together, we got screwed, and I was forever banished from the top 20%, also banishing me from any fall recruitment job I might have wanted (they all require top 20%, or your resume goes in the garbage). You should have heard graduation - almost no one between the letters E and J graduated with honors. So my law school experience could have been totally different if my name was Smith; how's that for arbitrary?
Anyway, I'm just saying, depending on your school, it is largely arbitrary (the fact it depends on your school leads to that conclusion as well). It doesn't stop there, just look at A Girl Walks Into A Bar (Exam)'s postings on her graded bar/bri essays. Which, veering back to my original topic, makes me feel this way about the bar exam - it all comes down to the person who's reading your essay, whether they choose to read carefully, whether they ate a hearty breakfast or had a fight with their spouse that morning. The large number of law students are so intellectually similar (and with bar/bri, we all are taught the exact same things in the exact same ways) that few if any of us will write an essay that stands out. So, I don't know, maybe they have to use the staircase method of grading, or else they'd have a pass rate of 95%.
I'm going to stop there because this is really long and I just woke up, so I'm not even sure it's coherent. We can keep discussing this if you like; let me know your thoughts.
As if I haven't written enough, I just wanted to clarify something, now that I've taken a shower and cleared my head. I responded about grades because you asked about them, and I do have an opinion, but it's not really the grades that concern me. I used them as an example at my blog because it was easy to explain.
Grades concern me less than the fact class rankings have become so important (i mean, some schools don't even rank!), and arbitrary grades lead to arbitrary rankings.
And I'm not so much upset about my grades or ranking (hey, i did okay), as I am that my work ethic and intellect don't really seem to matter in the long run, if it's all arbitrary. And it certainly could just be my personal experience, like with the internship I mentioned. But if they're going to use an arbitrary system just to knock some people out for the sole reason that there's too many of us with the same intellect and skills, they should be doing that with the LSAT or with law school admittance counselors telling us not to go in the first place. I digress, and I'll shut up now.
Man... your school really sucks. We have an absolute curve that can't be deviated from (actually I think that's one of the reasons grades here take so long). There were roughly 75 people in my section. Every class had to have 7-8 A's. If the prof wanted to give more, (s)he would have to go to the administration and justify a reason for doing so. Same thing if the prof wanted to give fewer than 10% of the people A's. Anything lower than a C- in any class has to be approved by the registrar personally.
I see why they rank us. They have to. If my school didn't give rankings nobody would get hired at large firms who only want the top 10%, because there would be no way for them to differentiate between the hireable people in the top 10% and those "pariahs" who "only" made top 15. At least this way somebody gets the job. Yale can get away without ranking because... well they're Yale. Same thing with Harvard and their weird 1L grade system. I do think schools can do things to improve the situation for students and mitigate the impact of a crappy ranking. My school ranks people from #1 to dead last. The really should probably just not release rankings for the bottom 50%, because it only screws these people.
When I say "everyone would eventually end up with a smattering of a's b's and c's" if grades were truly arbitrary, I mean EVERYONE. The fact that a lot of people don't is indicative of the non-arbitrary nature of grades. Of course most people are going to have a couple of good classes, a couple of bad classes, and mostly middle of the road classes. But your school sounds like it's really messed up (no offense), because the whole point of the forced curve (at least at our school) is to normalize discrepencies between sections, and actually give a uniform standard for judging people against one another. If they tried to pull that crap at our school I think we would be starting dumpster fires outside and rioting. The students at my school (myself included) are the bitchiest group of people in the world whenever there is the slightest hint that someone may be getting screwed.
I do understand the bizarre grading systems profs use (every prof is looking for something different), and how these seem arbitrary, but you just have to figure out what the prof wants. I didn't write the same style of exam for contracts as I did for torts, because I knew the profs were going to emphasize totally different things. Torts prof wanted policy/economic analysis and contracts prof wanted restatement sections/case law (it's actually very good that torts prof wanted policy, because, as I posted earlier, my knowledge of substantive tort law is woefully inadequate). My property prof... obviously wanted something totally different (which is why I DO think that exam was arbitrary), he wanted something bizarre and he didn't really communicate what in the hell it was that he was looking for to the class... so that exam was blind luck. In general though, at my school, I've found grades to be pretty fair overall (of course I also say this as someone sitting on the meatiest portion of the curve...)
You went to GW correct? (not that I want to pass on damaging info to potential applicants about your school or anything)
p.s. the top 25% and bottom 25% at my school are separated by 8/10ths of a point...
But your school sounds like it's really messed up.
BINGO! Which is why I may have a radically different view of law school than most people. Actually, I went to AU, not GW. Even my friends who generally liked law school HATED the shit we had to deal with from AU over the past three years.
We did, in fact, rage against the system many times first year. When we realized the Admin would rather take a crap on us than help us, we eventually stopped trying. My friends who were smart enough transferred to GW, which is probably why you thought I went there, because I talk about GW a lot as my scientific standard.
The only time when curve worked to my advantage was in that horrible chem class where nobody understood what the prof was saying. If you understood just a taaad more than your neighbor, you get a higher chance of getting an "A."
I'm feeling a little bit anxious after reading about Heather's post on straight-scale grading. However, the fact my future school has no GPA (instead you get A, B, and C on individual exams & papers, but there's no curves), no class ranking leads me to believe grading wouldn't be as bad. There's supposed to be some unofficial (but professionally accepted by recruiters) way of calculation where you stand in class (top 10%, top 15%, etc.)
That's what I was getting at with the whole "not ranking people at the bottom" thing. There really is no reason to come out and say "this person is ranked #237 out of 250 people." My school does that. They seem to want to screw people at the bottom in every possible way. However, having some way of determining who is top 10-25-50% is necessary, because that's the cut off for a lot of firms.
The curve... well the curve can save your ass, but it can also kill you. If we were tested on straight knowledge of property this semester everyone in my section would have a C or lower. Most of the time the curve is something to be feared and reviled though, like in Civ Pro, where everyone knew essentially the same amount of stuff, so ridiculously small errors on the exam lead to some people getting A's, and some people getting B-'s.
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