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< | Should I adopt the credit-fail grading system? |
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> | Teaching America's Leaders |
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-- By SamanthaWishman - 16 Feb 2012 |
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< | Do you know what the curve is like? |
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< | I was an English major at a 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. |
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< | 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? |
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> | As Justice O’Connor wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger when the Supreme Court upheld an affirmative action plan at Michigan Law School: "law schools represent the training ground for a large number of our Nation's leaders... Individuals with law degrees occupy roughly half the state governorships, more than half the seats in the United States Senate, and more than a third of the seats in the United States House of Representatives." |
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< | 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). |
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> | No doubt many of my classmates at Columbia will be successful. Collectively, they may very well influence the direction of the politics and the economy of our country. Since legal education must be more than the transfer of information-- it shapes attitudes and values and teaches methods of approaching and solving problems-- we have a profound national interest in what law schools teach our future leaders. |
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< | 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. |
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> | Law school is being attacked as too theoretical, not too practical, and basically un-altered since Langdell introduced the case method almost 140 years ago. David Segal’s November New York Times article, “After Law School, Associates Learn to Be Lawyers,” begins with a group of law school graduates unable to answer the question of how to execute a merger. Since law school doesn’t equip graduates to practice law, they must rely on employers to train them. |
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< | What does the curve teach? |
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> | The Times followed up later that month with an editorial, “Legal Education Reform,” suggesting that classes focused on analyzing appellate decisions may not be an effective way to train lawyers. They call for law schools to add more clinics and courses that better prepare graduates to practice as: “advocates and counselors, negotiators and deal-shapers, and problem-solvers.” |
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< | Class rankings encourage 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. |
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> | Fifteen years ago, Lani Guinier also called for a re-evaluation of how we teach and how we evaluate law students in the 1997 book, Becoming Gentlemen. She was provoked not by a legal hiring crisis, but by a study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania Law School that found gender and race predict law school class ranking-- better than LSAT and GPA-- to such an extent that “by the end of the first year men are three times more likely than women to be in the top 10% of their law school class” (28). While the men and women entered the 1L class with equivalent credentials, women consistently spoke less in class and performed worse over the three years. |
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< | 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. |
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> | Dismissing the proposition that women are less capable of becoming great lawyers, Guinier looks to institutional failure. She argues that the case method, the Socratic method, the large lecture, the single exam, and the grading system do not “create a learning space for those students--many of them women-- who learn better through collaborative and non-adversarial methods” (13). Women interviewed for the study reported feeling alienated by an institution that has not fundamentally changed since becoming co-ed. |
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< | The question of who or what is ranked higher is not a useful one to ask if you are trying to create a community where innovative thinking and problem solving can take place. |
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> | This year we read about another adversarial, all-male school that was loath to corrupt its teaching methods in the face of women. In U.S. v. Virginia (VMI), the U.S. brought suit to have women admitted to the most prestigious military academy in the country that fought tooth and nail to keep women out. Virginia argued that the “admission of women would downgrade VMI's stature, destroy the adversative system and, with it, even the school.” In contrast to the methods used at VMI, the school’s all-female counterpart, VWIL, “favored ‘a cooperative method which reinforces self-esteem.’” In what sound like tasks for a Girl Scout or DAR chapter, VWIL students would “take courses in leadership, complete an off-campus leadership externship, participate in community service projects, and assist in arranging a speaker series.” |
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< | For what do we educate? |
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> | The cooperative, hand-holding, female education described in VMI pales next to the tough, worth-bragging-about schooling the men receive. Even as Justice Ginsburg judges women admitted to VMI, it is with great reverence for the “pressures, hazards, and psychological bonding characteristic of VMI's adversative training.” Hazing has been thought to create stalwart pledges, but who is to say what value that may have and how it compares to the value of collaborative learning experiences? |
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< | 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. When I was visiting 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. |
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> | In Becoming Gentleman, Guinier adeptly moves the conversation away from why women don’t thrive in competitive, adversarial law school classrooms, and asks what behavior does the current education reward? What skills are most needed by 21st century lawyers and how does the current education develop and evaluate those skills? |
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< | Should law school administrators and professors prepare us for the world as it is or to change it? |
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> | The types of lawyering necessary to succeed in the 21st century are not just the adversarial, quick-response thinking that the Socratic method hones. In this brave new world, the “female” weaknesses Guinier identifies that keep women from optimal performance in law school -- listening, collaboration, and consensus-building -- will be strengths. |
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< | How do I best learn? |
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> | As Justice O’Connor told us, the dominance of lawyers running the country is even more striking when measuring the influence of highly selective schools. Graduates from law schools like Columbia account “for 25 of the 100 United States Senators, 74 United States Courts of Appeals judges, and nearly 200 of the more than 600 United States District Court judges.”
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? |
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< | 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. |
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< | 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 evaluations by professors on exams? 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. |
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< | Is opting out of curved grading freedom? Or, does freedom come from 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. |
| | Your writing here is very
good. The bozos at the Wharton School basically learned what one can |