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Law in Contemporary Society
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Days after we finished our finals we received the following email from the Dean of our law school which I am reposting here:
Congratulations on finishing your exams. I wanted to write to you about
an issue that is important to all of us: the timely submission of
grades. I know that not having timely grades can complicate job searches
and can impact students in other ways as well. So I wanted to let you
know that the faculty and I have been focusing on this issue, and that
we voted last Friday to set a hard deadline for grading exams and to
impose penalties on faculty who do not meet these deadline. Essentially,
starting next academic year, grades will be due on the Friday before
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (the Friday before the start of classes) for
the fall semester, and on June 15th for the spring semester (except, of
course, for graduating students, whose grades are due before
graduation). Those few members of the faculty who have a combined total
of more than 150 exams to grade will have an extra week. Faculty who do
not comply will be included on a list circulated to the faculty and
students, and they will also be fined. I realize that there will still
be some situations when, for extenuating circumstances, grades will be
late, but my hope is those situations will be rare. We realize that the
issue is important to you, and we are committed to addressing it. I want
to thank those of you who have raised the issue with me. Your
suggestions are important to us.
Best,
DS
I am not sure how the rest of you reacted but aside from some choice GSF emails we received throughout the year, this had to be one of the most ridiculous law school communications I have read thus far. Choice parts that I reacted to include the hard reasons that the Dean gives for exactly why timely submission of grades are so important. He writes that it can "complicate the job search" and gives the highly illuminating explanation that it "can impact students in other ways as well." Oh well that explains it. It is important because of the things that it does to the people. Right.
Now, I know I have friends who were certainly frustrated by late grades last semester, but can anyone explain to me how exactly this impacts us as students? To me, I think it is a blessing. Employers actually have to interview you and speak to you, speak to your references and maybe even read writing samples to evaluate you as a candidate. The only complication seems to be that employers have to open the cans and taste the meat instead of just reading the label- maybe the Dean can send them can openers instead of circulating lists that to me seem to be nothing more than a form of bullying. I am pretty disgusted by any form of public shaming as a coercive measure and the list of faculty who don't submit grades seems to be just that. And then fines? The Dean has so little control over the faculty that he de facto leads that he has to dock their pay?
Maybe there are students to whom this issue is important and if so, I would love to hear the reasons why, but to me this is little more than a foolish email that has much potential for Above the Law lampooning and on a more serious note threatens the kind of evaluative feedback that classes like this provide. If there are students who feel the same way and want to explain to the Dean why we need more feedback instead of just faster grading of exams, we should get together and formulate a way to present our thoughts to the Dean.
-- ElviraKras - 23 May 2012 |
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