• In truth, the LSAT score by itself does most of the admission-predicting.

In this system, earning good grades becomes a student’s primary focus. In an ideal world, the end to which students should strive is a mastery of the subject matter. In reality, however, the desire to learn is often supplanted by the desire to get an A. Due to the institutionalization of grades and tests scores as the measuring stick of academic merit, substance has been sacrificed for form in the education system in general and law schools in particular.

• This is the conventional proposition, but does it actually make any sense at the upper end of the performance curve, where we are in this conversation, talking about a selection in which half comes from the top half percent of the tail?

• Maybe. Again, this makes more sense as an explanation of the conduct of those who must struggle to achieve what the world considers commendable but not outstanding outcomes. How the motivations of exceptional students are constituted, and what it is they actually apply themselves to learning, should be discussed directly, not by analogy to everyone else. I doubt that the reason your generation of talented students has read so much less than I did is that there was more emphasis placed on grades in your childhood. There may well have been, but I don't think that made the difference. If you didn't love learning, that made the difference, and it wasn't relevant if you did love learning how often they tested you or what the tests were about.

• Why high school degrees have lost market value should be of no concern to you, given the supposed philosophic position of the essay. In fact, nothing interior to the schooling process dictated that outcome, but rather the transition from an industrial society that needed skilled workers requiring no further general education than a rigorous high school degree, to a knowledge-production society that requires advanced symbol manipulating capacity in the majority of workers, and rigorous engineering capacity for the manipulation of physical materials and information infrastructure in the large minority. High school plays little role in forming either of those worker types, because it is not directed--as it should be once the need for higher education is assumed--to the intensive cultivation of basic knowledge and the inculcation of personal enthusiasm for whatever forms of more advanced learning the individual mind seems most likely to succeed at.

• By hypothesis this is true only of those for whom the learning process is neither compatible with nor more interesting than smoking pot. Very intelligent young adults who have learned to love learning and are presented with it in profusion will take advantage of that opportunity. If they are helped to choose their curriculum intelligently--including by being left to discover for themselves how to balance their vices and their experiments against the known desirability of learning--society will get, from the small cohort it started with, a very substantial proportion in prime intellectual and moral condition. But you're supposed to know all this, because you're the one proposing yourself as rising superior to grades, right?

• What possible difference can grade inflation make? If when Harvard was primarily the institutional expression of New England's need for Congregational ministers, 10% of the graduating class was passed out into the world "cum laude," and now that Harvard's graduating classes contain a sizeable proportion of the world's academic and governmental elite, in most schools something north of half the class is so distinguished, so damn what? The outcome is not only not deplorable, it might even be justified under the meritocracy's own highest standards. But more importantly, under the role you have chosen here you are supposed to be arguing, competently if possible, against grades. You claim they are in almost all respects counterfeit and harmful currency. Then what business have you, with your nimbleness of mind and thinness of skull to be arguing against that detestable currency's inflation? Inflation is the death of bad money.

• The answer, of course, is that you claim that people won't learn unless they have to in order to compete, and that once the currency is inflated, people will be lazy because the poor will have too much money. This assumes the absence of love for learning, which is the emerging theme of what's missing from the analysis, so far as I'm concerned.

Admittance Procedure

• Failure to find the obvious and proper "Admission" here shows failure of one entire layer of editing, which is not merely proofreading (though proofreading is always essential), but also the layer that guarantees grammatical accuracy, without which you will sometimes stand unnecessarily suspected of illiteracy.

The problems with law school and its underlying principles are demonstrated first in the admission process. Law school focuses on unsupported numbers to grant admission. In doing so, they may pass over applicants with a true passion to succeed. Often, the applicants whose desire to enter law is based solely on making money or securing a respectable, stable job are the ones being accepted. In the end, I believe those with genuine passion for a calling will be the most successful. Many of those with this drive however will lack the numbers to gain admittance to schools where their opportunities will be maximized.

• This was just jargon, sentence after sentence. It ignored the "underlying principle" that applicants and their families, who regard US News & World Report rankings as significant, thereby determine every institution on slavish dedication to the USN&WR ranking algorithm. Which drives you up in the standings if your incoming class has high LSAT and GPA scores (in our range of the market, it is necessary to have the median of your entering JD class in the 99th percentile on LSAT, which means that nothing else counts for half the class), but does nothing whatever to help you if you take students who have an uncommon passion for the achievement of justice. That's the whole story right there, and you haven't laid a glove on it, for all the thwacking around.

Law School System and Conclusion

• But firms interview the people who work there. If what firms wanted was great young lawyers--which we may take as an hypothesis because they insist on it, although I am a little dubious--they could readily have them by combining an insistence on good grades (what difference does it make to them that grades are an arbitrary measure of capacity: they will take good grades for what they are, namely a sign of ability to adapt oneself to an institution whose task is to get legal work out of you) with an interview check for the love of learning. Then they would be able to exclude the mere unmerited time-servers you say you are so worried about. They would be getting people who earned good grades (which shows positive adaptivity as previously mentioned) and who also "merited" those grades because they would have worked just as hard to learn just as much if the grades hadn't existed in the first place.

• Actually, however, law firms don't really want those people, or rather they can't make a practice of preferring those people. Law firms prefer people who are more insecure, and less internally self-motivated, because that personality type is more easily manipulated into becoming the leveraged work force whose time is sold at an increasing multiple of its fixed cost. Insecurity, and a combination of braggadocio and envy better suits the firm's medium-term needs. Whether it ultimately decides to make such people partner, or instead ruthlessly weeds them out, they will be a large proportion of the leveraged workforce.

• What so deeply troubles me about this essay is the absence of contact with the other half of the social contract whose decay you're lamenting. There's plenty to say about schools in general, which has to do entirely with failures to achieve equality in America. But you're not talking about that; you're talking--excuse me--about yourself, and the rest of the people around here. And as to you, the high achievers of this society, the bargain has always been, and always should be, that in view of your talents for learning you will be enabled to learn as much as your love of learning prompts you to acquire. Much can be said, then, about the debt and other equality-failures even within the ruling class of this so-unequal society. But the love of learning as a legitimate precondition to the social benefit involved in graduate and professional education--much less the kind of extensive, individual assistance in career formation which is supposed to be given you around here--seems to be entirely irrelevant to your analysis of how students behave. How can someone who is aware of that motivation so entirely disregard it? How could you possibly be unaware of it? I'm beset by disappointment either way.