Lauren-- I went to that same meeting and I'm grateful for your insights about it. Particularly, I think your observation that the "issue had already been decided before it was raised" is spot on. I apologize for the length of my comment--feel free to take it or leave it for whatever it's worth.

I think there's one other potential reason why the real issue at stake here has already been decided. You accurately describe the pervasive "sense of fear" among students, given that our "future employment is dependent on one final exam." This is partly the product of a rigid grading curve, as you point out. But it also partly results from the fact that our entire grade depends on "one final exam," which students perceive as leading to arbitrary and variable results. The single final exam model doesn't seem to serve any legitimate pedagogic purpose; quite the contrary, it seems to be the pervasive model of law school evaluation because it makes a 100:1 student-to-teacher ratio viable, freeing up professors to concentrate their energy on research rather than on teaching.

Moving to a Honors/High Pass/Pass/Fail system would not necessarily address that problem. Indeed, I wonder whether the discussion about changing from one grading system to another has the effect of distracting from this second issue, which has also "already been decided."

Building on Eben's comment, "useful evaluation" from professors would certainly require our teachers to "work harder" for us. It would also require reducing class sizes by hiring more teachers, since providing continuous and thorough evaluations for 100 1Ls throughout the semester is so much more onerous than grading one set of anonymous exams at the end of the semester. And it might also require hiring more teachers -- i.e., the school would have to reaffirm its commitment to supporting skilled teachers by giving teaching greater weight in tenure and hiring decisions, on the model of the liberal arts college rather than the research university.

Without these two institutional changes, it seems unlikely to me that professors will be able adopt a more useful and pedagogically valuable evaluation system.

-- DanielMargolskee - 28 Mar 2009