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 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?

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.

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.

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.

For what do we educate?

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.

Should law school administrators and professors 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 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.

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 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.

Meditate, I beseech you, upon Rule 3.1.2 as upon Trim's hat.

After class yesterday, standing under the stormcloud of pending final exams, I started thinking a lot about J.D. Rule 3.1.2. I think Sam raises a good point about how opting out of the curve could be a sign of bravery, removing us from inclusion in the meaningless “pecking order” championed through the grading system. However, a rule cannot remove us from reality unless we are willing to change the way we think-like Sam muses, I think the only escape is through imagination. As such, I see no benefits, for anyone, of opting out.

Certainly, those who “beat the curve”-to use the trite law school lexicon- would not see any benefits to opting out of grading. (Except for maybe avoiding any deflation of their A averages, and thereby egos.) But for those of us, myself included, who did not achieve the highest grades, who fell into the amorphous average to below-average range, I see no benefit of opting out of the curve either.

It appears on the surface as though opting out may remove us from the hierarchy, and, as Sam says, make us more “happy and liberated” law students. However, professors and classmates may look down on us if they know we have removed ourselves from being subject to the grading system. Employers, too. I agree with Sam’s sentiment in that I would not want to work for an employer who measures my potential success and worth by looking at my grades. I think Eben’s method of emphasizing interviewing and ignoring transcripts altogether is a much more effective hiring practice. However, if we don’t receive grades, others will undoubtedly still subject us to a ranking in a hegemonic pecking order.

Other parties will look at someone who opts out from grades as weak, and rank that person accordingly. Even more paramount, if a person opts out, his/her conscience will be cognizant of that choice. To me, it seems a cowardly choice to remove ourselves from a system we may seem trapped by. By choosing not to have grades, we would be submitting to the system.

However, we can escape damnation to this arbitrary, meaningless hierarchy. We can free ourselves from it, but only through our own motives and outlook, not from exercising our rights under JD Rule 3.1.2. The only escape is through our own creative power.

By telling myself a B makes me no more inferior, no dumber, no less capable than my peers, I have been able to instrumentally mollify the negative effects of the hierarchy on my life. Granted, I have not been able to completely remove the impact the system has on me, but I have made progress. I could make the material choice of not receiving grades, but, without focusing on my own learning and development, that choice would weigh on me and have no real affect.

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.