Let's stipulate that the question, how we should educate America's most privileged and possibly most gifted law students, is at the center of this inquiry. The references to Grutter and to Lani's book suggest that a secondary focus on matters of bias and diversity may also be present, but—as I've mentioned before—it's hard to manage two ideas in this space, so let's stick to the primary issue.

If I understand you correctly, your point is that these future leaders of the society should be taught to collaborate, should be skilled active listeners, and should know how to seek and advance consensus. Because that's what society in the 21st century is going to need. I'm not sure why the 20th century didn't need those skills in its leaders, or whether we really don't also need people who are quick on their feet, strong in argument, eloquent, etc. Rather than trying to explain why any of these virtues isn't needed, or why the required virtues for leaders have somehow changed, let's stick to your positive case that these are important virtues for leaders. They are also particularly useful skills for negotiators, including the sorts of deal-makers who are found in large law firms serving the interests of the financial services industries. This institution is sharply specialized in providing units of personnel to such law firms. Why doesn't that result in an instructional system tailored in such a useful direction? If you ruminate on that for a bit, I think you'll find yourself impelled productively.

I also think, however, that the actual virtues required of leaders might go beyond the set identified. Courage, for example, I think is important, as you know. How does one teach that? Resourcefulness, self-direction, good judgment, capacity for self-criticism, tension-reducing humane humor, eloquence to move people in numbers, and both magnetism and tactfulness to move individuals in face-to-face settings—how are these to be taught in law school, where future leaders are being bred who would be so much more valuable to society with these virtues aboard.

Another question you might ponder: to what extent do you want to teach "leaders," who will wind up using their efforts in existing institutions, and how much do you want to invest in training iconoclasts, who will prune institutions, or visionaries, who will invent modalities of social change and adaptation that don't exist in present institutional form?

Really, after all, it's about people, as every social process and institution is. If one took teaching seriously, one would choose students carefully, train them individually, with attention to their learning styles, powers, goals, and weaknesses. One would take "advising" and "teaching" as inextricably interrelated activities, associated in a process we now tend to call "mentoring."

But we can't do that and train so many "leaders" who never actually lead anything, but do give the grindings of the faces of the poor in contribution to the law school.

Teaching America's Leaders

We live in a country where the total assets of the top 400 people equal the assets of the bottom 140 million people, where 46.2 million people live in poverty, and where the imbalance between college completion by rich and poor students has grown over 50% since the 1980s. With a government deeply divided, with a population deeply divided, and a nation at war, a cooperative, compassionate, legal education should be imperative.

The New York Times published an article, “A Regime’s Tight Grip on AIDS,” asking why HIV has been so well contained in Cuba. One reason: “Socialist education teaches Cubans to feel responsible for one another.” What does law school teach us?

(Though I will say that in "deciding what's best for you," it's interesting to see what default the school chooses and how that affects your own choice. Obviously, choosing to have no grades becomes a much easier option to pick when most other students are in the same boat. By putting the default at grades, it seems that the school has decided that what's 'best' for at least the majority of students is to have grades rather than not. I wonder if that assumption is really valid...)

PS Sorry for taking over your paper, Sam, but thanks for provoking this conversation!

-- JaredMiller - 23 Apr 2012

I definitely did not mean to say that I think grades should be abandoned. Quite the contrary- we should not opt out of grades, but should use them in a way that best suits us. We need to divorce from the pervasive mentality of tying them to our self-worth. It's undisputed that grades can be effective in pushing us to learn. I only wish they were less effective in defining us. To make that happen, though, we need to change our mentality, not opt out of the system.

Abby, I wholeheartedly agree with you that there is another exit from the rat race that is the 1L grading system aside from Rule 3.1.2. We certainly have the freedom and the capability to ignore the Scarlet B and not let it define our intelligence, our effort or our growth, and it is vitally important that all of us understand that.

But I honestly don't think that's a vision based in reality (at least for most of people). I can't speak for you, but I have found that I'm a person who unfortunately needs mechanisms in my life to help me break bad habits and reinforce good ones. On a small scale, that means I need to put my alarm on the other side of room or else I'll find myself right back in bed sleeping through my first class. It means turning off my WiFi? during class lest I spend half the lecture on the Internet. In this context, it means I know I'll find meaning in those meaningless letters on my transcript, no matter how many times I tell myself that it's a reflection of nothing more than my ability to hit 14 major points in under four hours, a skill that I likely will never be forced to replicate past these three years. I tell myself that, but I'll only half-believe it. I imagine most other people will feel the same way.

I think Credit-Fail acts as a mechanism to help me along the way, no more, no less. You're right that getting rid of those letters is not going to be my silver bullet. I will still need to remind myself constantly that I need to follow my own path and discover my own means of measuring my progress. But I don't think that refusing to subject myself to a measure that I know hinders that progress is a cowardly move in the slightest. We all have ideals of what we should be and how we should think, and we all need help getting from point A to point B, especially when that path is fraught with so many obstacles that are wrapped in our Self-Doubt. In the long run, removing one of those major obstacles may be the best way to succeed. And if so, we should do it.

I also disagree that choosing not to have grades means that we are in fact submitting ourselves to the system. Your statements that professors and classmates may look down on us and employers will see us as weak if we go C/F seems to imply that we should care about their reactions. Why? I appreciate your realist perspective that, in the end, grades often DO matter, but I actually think that in this case, you may be wrong. Honestly, the one great thing about EIP is that every firm that you're assigned to interview with has to interview with you no matter what your grades are. That set-up provides you with a golden opportunity, one in which you can eloquently explain that you choose not be measured by the arbitrariness of a four-hour period and suffer from all of the negative side effects that come along with that process. Instead, you have enough trust in your ability to learn the material that the exam's push from behind is wholly unnecessary. You are confident that the skills that the firm will find valuable - your writing, your work ethic, your personability, your analytical skills - are top-notch and wouldn't have changed one bit if those C's were moved up two letters in the alphabet. Yes, some firms will think you're weird and take a pass. But fuck them. Others will love you and your confidence, your creativity and your unwillingness to be a sheep. They'll understand that you're a person who can actually contribute to their work, and they'll treat you that way once you arrive.

One last note that will may make me sound like a bit of a hypocrite, but I'll put it out there anyway. I don't 100% share Eben's sentiment that grades are the worst thing known to man. In my academic experience, I often gain a great deal from the studying experience of looking at a course as a whole, taking the time to re-examine everything and trying to plug it into my brain. As I said, I personally respond to mechanisms and incentives, and I often feel that the threat of a bad mark at the end of the semester is the thing pushing me to learn and absorb the material in a way that I quite honestly wouldn't have the willpower to accomplish in the same way otherwise. Again, I'm guessing many people (though probably not everyone) feel the same way. I very much agree that there are many things about grades that are terrible - how we (and employers) lionize them, how poorly they often reflect our true abilities, how they often serve as a substitute for, instead of complement to, productive critical feedback, how they just make us crazy - but I'm not willing to go so far as to say they should be abandoned. But if that's what you think is better for you, you should take full advantage of it.

-- JaredMiller - 19 Apr 2012

In essence, by exercising our rights under Rule 3.1.2, we can remove ourselves from the possibility of a “Scarlet B.” But if that grade doesn’t mean anything to us anyway-as it shouldn’t-then why does it matter if it’s on our transcript? The rule can’t free us. Only we can do that ourselves.

Your writing here is very good. The bozos at the Wharton School basically learned what one can do with Microbrain Excel. What they didn't learn about writing by not reading 19th century English fiction and satire—along with the efforts to master Shakespeare and Macaulay they were much too frightened to make—you can see around you, here and elsewhere, anytime you look.

Substantively, I feel as though you've written the draft that precedes the draft for the reader, the one that tells you how you came to the idea that you and the reader can share. Unless the idea is "Portrait of Sam as a Young Lawyer on the Edge," in which we see the arrival of the split, but not the way you work to bring your two selves into uneasy, dynamic, potentially fractious, unsparing and loving communion.

Possessed as you are of the keys here, I think you are one draft away from the even more important one, the "Portrait of Sam Becoming" whose beauty will take even your breath away. Young Harry did you great service in showing you Rule 3.1.2, but he did not show you how to read it in both your selves, wise as serpents, mild as doves.

Should I adopt the credit-fail grading system?

-- By SamanthaWishman - 16 Feb 2012

Do you know what the curve is like?

I was an English major at a big, bad, greed-is-good university where American Psycho was aspirational and “finance” was a pickup line. My mom liked to tell me I was living in the 80s.

The young captains of industry who went to the best undergraduate business program in the country often turned up their noses at those of us in the College of Arts and Sciences. They would scoff: Humanities! The College of Arts and Crafts! Do you know, they would ask with brass, what a Wharton curve is like?

I did not. I took two Wharton classes and refused to be graded in either of them for fear of subjecting my sensitive liberal arts soul to the monsters in the Tower of Greed (what English majors poetically called the business school).

One day before my 19th Century Satire class, a few students got to talking. We were tired of the degradation, tired of the name-calling. I hate it when they call them Mickey Mouse classes, we bemoaned. We wanted respect. I naively said we needed a curve.

What does the curve teach?

Aside from wanting the poor students of the humanities to get the credit they deserve, it also seemed a disgusting waste for so many bright young minds pursuing disparate fields to be preoccupied with hierarchy at the cost of seeking out what could be achieved together. Part of me hoped that a curve in the College classes would be a way to get beyond that hang-up. Of course, even with uniform grading the business school students could still find a way to assert their superiority since Wharton ranked higher than the College in the U.S. News & World Report.

We live in a country where the total assets of the top 400 people equal the assets of the bottom 140 million people, where 46.2 million people live in poverty, and where the imbalance between college completion by rich and poor students has grown over 50% since the 1980s. In the heat of media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the young captains of industry chanted in the lobby of the Tower of Greed: Get a job. Occupy Occupy Wall Street. We are the 1%. I wonder how much the teachings of the curve helped to justify this position.

Questions of rank do not inspire worthwhile conversations, but they do inspire students to unquestioningly affirm the value and inevitability of competition and order. In describing the effect of curve grading in his article, “Law School as Training for Hierarchy,” Duncan Kennedy asserts that the process of subjecting students to a system of hierarchy and of student acquiescence to being placed in relation to each other assimilates graduates to future hierarchical systems.

For what do we educate?

I was on a panel of young alumnae from my all-girls high school to answer the question of how to educate young women to be prepared for the business world. We said the school was too indulgent and too encouraging. The world is tough and competitive and you have to fight for yourself. So, if you want to help these young women, get them to wise up.

Kennedy argues that curved grading is unnecessary if the goal of legal education is to provide high quality legal services. A reallocation of resources could provide a majority of law students with the technical proficiency that only a minority of students currently receive. During law school admissions programs students and administration explained why the curve was necessary: so employers will know how to differentiate us. If that is the end, then the curve is the means.

Are law school administrators and professors allies or adversaries? Should law school prepare us for the world as it is or to change it?

How do I best learn?

After my first semester at law school the curve told me that my exam performance was average to below average in a pool of above-average students. The grades I got didn’t help me learn, but perhaps higher grades next semester would give me assurance of progress, in case I couldn’t see progress on my own.

I did not know until reading Harry’s essay that we can opt out of grading through J.D. Rule 3.1.2. What would be the impact of not subjecting myself to evaluation by one professor on one exam? Would a firm look down on me for opting out of grades-- either suspicious that the grades were bad or suspicious of a wayward soul? If they didn’t appreciate my decision, is that somewhere I would want to work? In terms of my own education, I could no longer be motivated by the hope of affirmation that follows feelings of superiority that the curve can provide. I imagine that I would be a happy and liberated law student, or at least have one less reason not to be.

Is opting out of curved grading freedom? Or, does freedom come by learning how to transcend grades and ranking? That could be a useful lesson. If law school is a test of the imagination, perhaps grades are part of the test.

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