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Grades?
If you're a law student: When did you get your grades?
I ask because at GW, we're going to get our grades today. Yes, today—a full three weeks after the semester began. That seems pretty late to me, and pretty disrespectful on GW's part. It's as if the school is saying: "We know you got almost zero feedback last semester and you'd really like to know how you did so you can start figuring out how to do better, but, well, too bad for you!" But perhaps its standard practice for law schools to wait to release grades until everyone has already accepted their loan checks and made a fairly significant commitment to the spring semester—great business practice! At least we know where these schools' priorities lie.*
Whatever. We'll get our grades today, so yesterday ProfCivPro gave us three reasons to keep grades in perspective:
- They're 1st semester grades. You've got lots of time to improve.
- They are only grades. Grades are not an accurate reflection of intelligence, knowledge, or capability; they're simply the only thing we've come up with that's workable.
- The Big Picture: Keep in mind that a few weeks from now, your grades won't seem very significant, nor are they significant compared with the rest of your life.
Still, point 2 is absolutely correct: Grades are very close to meaningless. As a teacher, I tried to find ways to avoid giving grades at all, but that wasn't really possible in a school that required me to fill out grading bubble-sheets at the end of every semester, thereby reducing everything my students had done for three months to a single letter. The best I could come up with was a self-grading system that I won't go into here. A lot of very smart people have made a lot of very smart arguments about the evils of grades and have proposed much better systems of evaluation that would give students better feedback, and thereby do more to help them learn. These systems would also give employers or anyone else who cared to look at the evaluations a much better idea of the student's strengths and weaknesses. But such systems are not "efficient," they take time, and in our system, we care less about quality than we do about quantity. Reduce everything to numbers, then we can crunch them and compare them and make fast, simple decisions with zero thought or meaning! Yay!
* "Law school" is perhaps a misnomer; "law business" or "J.D. factory" would probably be more appropriate. Also, I anticipate that anyone wishing to defend GW or law schools who release grades late generally will argue that law profs grade their own exams, and they each have 100 students or more, and it just takes time. All true. But to me that's just another argument for smaller classes and perhaps for longer breaks between semesters.
Posted January 23, 2004 06:34 AM | law school
If it makes you feel less alone, Temple is still in the process too (some sections have all their grades, some have none). I really think the biggest "problem" with late grades is that it ruins any joy of learning in new classes where you should have a fresh start because you are entirely focused on grading not learning for at least 2-3 weeks of the semester.
Posted by: Shara at January 23, 2004 02:00 PM
We had 2 of our grades prior to the new semester beginning on the 12th, however the final two were posted by the end of the first week of Spring semester. I know that part of it is that by taking a final on the 19th, they can't really ask that professor who gets the bad luck of the draw to spend the entire winter break (including all holidays) grading exams for 90 students. A professor told me that a good professor won't grade more than 8 per day because after 8, you're just cranky & bitter and more apt to give a bad grade.
Then after the grades are submitted, they have to be approved by the Dean and the registrar and then entered into the system. That was the hold up at Loyola...GW may work on a similar system.
More power to your grading comments. I'm just annoyed that in a class where everyone did well, a 92 is really an 84. Yuck.
Posted by: Cinnamon at January 23, 2004 03:43 PM
Good luck! I am sure you will do well. :)
We got our in a trickle down effect - one on the 8th, one on the 9th, and one on the 10th. Schools started back on the 12th. Then there was some waiting so we could sweat at least a little. Then we got the final 2 on the 15th.
Comically, one section had all of their grades coming back and the other section got one and just got the rest of theirs on Monday. Very random.
And yet, we still don't have our class rank. How wonderful. LOL
Posted by: DG at January 23, 2004 04:01 PM
I think it's disrespectful to release them late, because people make huge financial decisions based on those grades, as you point out. All of ours were released before the financial aid checks had to be signed.
As for the obsession on grades in general, it's flabbergasting. As you know, my background is in engineering. I don't think I appreciated how much of a meritocracy engineering was until I left.
I had an inkling of how grade-obsessed law students were when I was studying for my history major. (I did a double major as an undergrad, computer science and history.) I found my fellow history students substantially more concerned with that final rank than the engineering students were. After thinking about those students, and the law students, I've come to the (hardly original) conclusion that the rank/grade obsession occurs in part because there are no widely recognized ways of measuring ability in law, or, more generally, in the humanities. I think it's human nature to rank and compare, and where there aren't a lot of options, unlike engineering, we focus on one method, as in law.
In engineering, it's quickly obvious whether somebody knows what they're talking about. Therefore, I've never once seen a transcript needed in an interview, or even a GPA. I saw a 3.0 student from the local state school hired over a 3.9 student from the local elite school because the 3.0 student was able to convincingly demonstrate better coding ability.
While I'm very happy with law school in general, the obsession with grades still surprises me. I hope that it's not as big a deal as people say it is.
Posted by: transmogriflaw at January 23, 2004 07:47 PM
I wish I had me some grades. May not have them until Febraury 4. It is just another way the "Man" fucks with us.
Posted by: justin at January 23, 2004 10:41 PM
Oh.. and that last argument (from the law school perspective) sucks a big fat one. Because unless a prof is sabbaticalling (yeah, I made that word up!) second semester, s/he has two new classes to teach! So isn't it their interest to get grades done before the next semester begins?
Posted by: justin at January 23, 2004 10:43 PM
Some Michigan students (like me) now have all their grades. Some have only one. Ha ha ha.
Posted by: Heidi at January 24, 2004 10:47 AM
Still waiting a few blocks away at GULC. Rumor is they'll come Wednesday - but, apparently they said that last year and they actually came down closer to the second week of Feb.
Posted by: disputation at January 25, 2004 11:00 AM
tulane's grades come out one at a time - so you get to experience the trauma of it once a week for each class - last grades for 1L's don't come out till next tuesday
Posted by: Anonymous at January 25, 2004 07:11 PM
Here at Penn we're still waiting. A few weeks ago we were told to expect them this week or next week, but I haven't heard anything more specific since then.
Posted by: laura at January 26, 2004 02:55 PM
FYI: Jewish Buddha has a good discussion/summary of how other law schools release grades. Sounds like GW is fairly average in taking so long...
Posted by: ambimb at January 26, 2004 06:54 PM
I don't care if the professor spends his or her entire break grading. That's the school's fault for having a final (in my case) on Dec. 22nd. We just got our grades on Friday 23rd and I still am missing one. It is completely disrespectful to make the students wait so long. Not only does it keep us in limbo, people who actually got interviews have no grades to show. Anyway, our student body is pissed but it's been this way for quite a while and apparantly the administration just doesn't care.
Posted by: prelude at January 27, 2004 10:51 PM
If you're here from JD2B and would like to read more discussion of law school grades, there's a bit more here, and even more here.
Posted by: ambimb at January 30, 2004 08:25 AM
Your professor was so right i nthe 3 points he gave, quiet proffesors you've got.
visit me @ http://2lawschool.blog-city.com
Posted by: Iysam Atwan at February 1, 2004 06:10 PM
DID I JUST SPELL PROFESSORS WITH DOUBLE 'F' AND ONE 'S'.
GOD, SHOOT ME
Posted by: Iysam Atwan at February 1, 2004 06:13 PM
