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.

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

Jared, I definitely do not think we should abandon grades. I was trying to say that doing away with grading, or exercising our rights under JD Rule 3.1.2, would be of no benefit to us. What we need to do is use (or ignore) the grading system in a way that most helps us learn as individuals.

A few points in response to your arguments:

Firstly, I agree that grades have merit as a mechanism for many people. A grading system is useful if it helps us learn and incentivizes us to listen in class instead of surfing the web (or skipping class entirely). Additionally, I too benefit from looking at the course as a whole while studying for a final exam, which, without a grade, I would likely lack the motivation to do. In that sense, grades are beneficial. However, I don't think law school utilizes grades in this beneficial capacity. If law school is going to persist on grading us, I think we'd all benefit from receiving grades intermittently rather than just at the end. By getting feedback on midterms, papers, etc., I could correct my missteps and track my progress. I doubt I only speak for myself when I say that the current system leads me to cram all of my substantial learning into a stressful, nearly sleepless two-week period, vomit all of it onto my laptop screen, and subsequently forget it all. I actually tried to avoid this: I contacted two professors soon after winter break to schedule a time to go over my exams and see my mistakes, and both told me I had to wait until mid-March to discuss my exam with them. By that time, I had forgotten everything I'd written; there was no hope of progress. You are right-grades do have benefits-but the current system does not allow them to be fully realized.

On that note, I am a little confused about why you advocate the option to opt out as the removal of a major obstacle. You say that grades are an incentivizing mechanism, motivating us to learn. Therefore, by opting out, you are removing that motivation, perhaps the only thing that makes grades worthwhile. Furthermore, my point exactly is that through opting out, we won't avoid the obstacle of being subjected to others' judgment. Even if we opt out, we'll be subject to that so long as we care. And we can stop caring what others think while still receiving grades.

That brings me to my second, and more important, point. I agree with you that it's very difficult, even impossible, for the majority of us to completely ignore grades, to divorce ourselves completely from the reality of law school. Quite clearly, grades have been motivation to many of us throughout our lives-otherwise we wouldn't be here. It is an idealistic notion to think we can totally ignore the pervasive grading system. What I was trying to say is that we can ignore the "rat race" that accompanies it.

I said that employers and peers may disprove of us opting out; however, I did not mean to indicate that we should care. Quite the opposite, in fact. What I am trying to say is that it's an inescapable reality that we will be judged on our academic record. Opting out will not be a rabbit hole allowing us to get away from this truth. The only way to free ourselves from the confines of the system is to tell ourselves that others' judgment of us on these bases are meaningless.

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.

Hello Abby! I think there's a bit of confusion between what we're saying, so sorry for not being clearer. I never thought you were advocating abandoning grades. My little side note at the end was not really at all addressed to your comments but instead just to the idea that grades have no value at all (I completely agree with you that it's not grades per se that are the problem but instead the way the law school fails to supplement grades with constructive criticism and feedback.) I guess my point is this: If grades do more benefit to you than harm, if you think they help you learn and help incentivize you to dive deeper into the material, then keep them. If you find instead that they're more trouble than they're worth, that they're destructive to your academic experience, that you can't turn off the part of your brain that says "these things are important" and that negatively affects the way you learn, then go credit/fail. Having grades can help. Not having grades can help. Just decide what's best for you.

(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