The Mythology and Ultimate Poverty of the Curve

-- By ScottThurman - 26 Feb 2009

Introduction

What are grades? They are the one constant in law school and yet are rarely discussed. We talked briefly about whether grades were useful and whether students should dismantle the grading system. We should. Law school grades, especially but not exclusively as a product of a curve, are deeply involved in a mythology of American individualism that distorts the swindle that occurs when students exchange their waking hours for law firm employment.

• The rhetoric here feels overheated and out of scale. This isn't anything important you're talking about: It's just grades.

The curve and the myth of individualism

The grades we receive appear to be our work product and, because of that, seem to stand for us. And in some ways they do. Individual effort makes a great deal of difference in what grades students make. Grades frequently correspond to a student’s work ethic, to a student’s dedication, to hours spent reading and thinking. In a mythology that insists that hard work is rewarded, in the first theater of the American Dream, grades are the compensation for being serious and determined. In this sense, the pride instilled in a child when receiving high grades has roots in a Puritanical work ethic and an American sense of meritocracy. We have created a system that awards diligence and effort from childhood on.

More arbitrarily, more personally, grades are a product of our bodies. Grades correspond to a set of individual, if not controllable, characteristics: our capacities for memorization and oral and verbal retention, the speed with which our synapses make connections, our physical reactions to stress. Grades bridge the world between our physical abilities and our merit: the SAT, for example, originally proclaimed to be a test of physical aptitude for learning, and only in the face of evidence that class, race, and a variety of other factors affect SAT scores did it become a test of achievement.

• This reduction of mind to body is really very striking. The SAT was never said to be about physical aptitude, just aptitude. (SAT is still an aptitude test, so far as its makers are concerned.) Your idea that intellectual activity is simply physical activity in the brain is not the usual approach taken by this or any other society. It's interesting, but it presents some of the usual problems of reducing all mental processes to physical states in the brain.

Whatever grades might or might not say about the individual, they communicate nothing about individuals in law schools. They are designed to say nothing. The curve makes grades completely dependent upon the performance of others. Here, the veneer of individuality has been rubbed away. A curved grade does not reveal what any student actually knows or can do. Instead, it speaks only to if a student knows more than some other student (or at least appears to know more within the context of a high-pressure, highly artificial three-hour exam).

• This is the strangest argument in the world. It bears no relationship to how one actually grades. Shouldn't you explain how you know this, and why those of us who actually do the grading could be so mistaken as to how it's all done?

The function of the curve

For firms

A curve divides students’ performances on a test into categories of better or worse.

• No. A curve sets marginal limits on the brackets within which one reports each student's position on an absolute ranking of performance. A curve with limits as elastic as ours has very little effect on the distribution of grades overall. Its effect is neither in structure nor in magnitude remotely like what you are describing here.

The mythological structure of American society enlarges this singular performance into a categorical evaluation on one’s self: you are better or worse. The mythology that surrounds the GPA – that we are better than some, worse than others – is of no use to students. Law school grades say nothing meaningful about our strengths and weaknesses. The function of grades is to aid to employers. Grades make for a value-added component of individuality that allows employers to more easily make decisions about who is worth employing. GPA represents one of the most important components of the material surplus that firms believe they receive in hiring a student. Grades are just a component in a swindle. Grades produce students who are in demand because of their relative distance from other students with lower grades. But this value is empty, because the very scarcity of a certain GPA in the market is decided by an arbitrary curve. Indeed, grades’ only value derive from their self-determined rarity and a mythology of meritocracy that associates doing better than others with being better than others. Grades allow law firms to decide whom to hire without bothering to remember that they are hiring real people; grades supply the necessary, if actually non-existent, element of the individual.

• This too doesn't make any sense. How could "top ten percent" be a category subject to artificial or induced scarcity? If ranking makes any sense it isn't made either more or less sensible depending on how you place the measuring lines on the stick. One, two, and three standard deviations from the mean would be a coherent way of doing marking the stick, one might suppose. Seventy, eighty, and ninety percent might be another good set of places to mark the stick. Both are curves.

For students

Of course, the swindle also cuts the other way. Students buy into the same mythology that employers do. Grades lend to the whole process of exchanging ourselves for money some imprimatur of value. We have achieved these grades, or we have entered this school, because of qualities intrinsic to ourselves, qualities that law firms seek. We can use this to conceal the hard fact that the hiring practices of law firms must by their nature be ambivalent to the individual qualities of whom they hire; the sheer logistics of most firm’s economic structure – wide at the bottom, narrow at the top – ensures that law firms will recruit lots of first-year associates that must be driven off ten years later. Conversely, employment can also work as compensation for the diminution that occurs when a student discovers to his or her chagrin that he or she has performed less well than others. Thus the frequent recital of the mantra that grades don’t matter here, because we’ll all get good jobs. In exchange for the diminution of self, we can choose the supposed equalizer – money.

Conclusion

I began with an appeal to change the grade system, but it now seems painfully clear that such a change is hardly necessary. The need represented by the curve – to coat the exchange of self for money with a veneer of merit – would certainly find a different channel. Indeed, one of the most common objections I’ve heard to abolishing the grade system is that it would force students to find other ways to individualize themselves. Students’ lives, under this argument, would become too filled with activities and volunteering, because law students would need a full and varied resume – a more full expression of who they are or who they want to appear to be – to compensate for the loss of grades as a proxy. Maybe what matters most here is the recognition of a symptom endemic to the legal education system and more broadly to education as a whole – the need to reify the self, to make it marketable.

• Maybe. That would be worth exploring without all the law school specific baggage it took to get to this last general idea. I feel myself as though that's really where the essay should begin. Getting there felt as though it were more about your concerns with an imaginary grading system than any response to actual policy as it affects you. Maybe fixing the discussion of grading would be useful, to help dispel such misunderstandings as are apparent from your account. But it's also possible that the right way to go is to start at the end, and figure out what your idea of the self on sale means to you.

Teaching, coercion, examination

-- By ScottThurman - 15 Apr 2009

Teaching and coercion

A school is not, however, a passive transmitter of these norms. School is coercive – it disciplines us, it applies force to us, it shapes us. Instructional moments between teachers and students, at their base, consist of the teacher’s belief that there is something incorrect, wrong, ignorant, or less than optimal in the student’s performance, and the teacher’s attempt to demonstrate what’s wrong, what should be changed.

The presence of coercion is not itself problematic. As discussed in the opening paragraph, we are in school because we want to learn. We have voluntarily submitted to the coercion of schools, and we’re willing to submit to the discipline, to the occasional reminders that we have not, in the eyes of our teachers, mastered our subjects. The ideal student wants to feel the force of the ideal teacher, even if it is painful. The ideal student wants to be changed. And, I think most importantly, the ideal student wants to know how he or she is going to be changed before submitting to force.

Evaluation as the fundamental coercive element of school

The conventional law school class

When I’m sitting in most classes, I am not sure what I am supposed to be learning. I can tell from the teacher’s questions that I should know cases’ facts, judges’ reasoning. I know that I should memorize relevant sections of Restatements and codes. I have only vague ideas of how any of this connects to what lawyers do – changing society with words.

The usual excuses offered for the ambiguity of law school instruction are unpersuasive. We are told that law school instruction is ambiguous because the practice of law is complex and ever changing. But that mistakes the type of normative stance I want the teacher to take. I understand that legal arguments are rarely absolutely right or wrong. I understand that our professors cannot give us easy answers about when a set of facts meets some standard or passes some legal test. I understand that a case does not, necessarily, have a stable, universally understood holding. But I don’t want to know if I’m right or wrong; I want to know if that path I took to get to the answer was more or less effective. And, given the range and diversity of legal arguments, I want to understand as well as I can what criteria the professor has used to evaluate that efficacy. Such feedback gives me the tools to both determine how I can further change and, perhaps more importantly, if I agree enough with the professor’s stance to want to change.

Of course, to be in a position to offer us feedback, professor must give us opportunities to demonstrate our legal skills. In most of our classes, students will be given at most two or three opportunities to demonstrate their progress in legal reasoning before the final. Or, more accurately, we’ll be given two or three opportunities to recite some facts from a case, or to sniff out whatever ball the professor is hiding. With no ability to get real, meaningful evaluations before the final, our study becomes more exhausting (because we have no normative goals, we do not know the parameters of the evaluation -- neither what content will be covered on the final exam, nor, more openly, what skills we’re supposed to be developing) and our performance more arbitrary. Maybe this sort of evaluation mirrors the management style of a large law firm: vague directives, little over-sight, and idiosyncratic standards. But that seems like a bad way to run a law firm, and a worse way to run a school.

Evaluations as resistance

In a law school where teachers were forced to give frequent evaluations, students could experience several substantive teaching moments. Moreover, teachers would be under a harder-to-ignore burden: they would have to determine much earlier in the semester what their normative goals for the class were and whether their teaching methods were effective moving the class toward those goals.

I don't mean to make it sound like teachers must bear an inordinate amount of the burden in ensuring learning. Learning is a collaborative effort, which requires a heavy investment on both parties. Rather, I think that by extending the evaluation process, teachers would be making it more possible for students to determine both if they wanted to learn (that is, if they wanted to be changed in the way the teacher offered) and if they actually were learning.