WHEN IT comes to trend-setting in higher education, no one can touch Harvard. Even in those years that US News and World Report ranked it behind Princeton for having the top undergraduate program, everyone still thought Harvard to be synonymous with elite academia, with students and faculty who were the cream of the crop. When they change something — anything — people listen.
Take the example of early action admission. Once Harvard axed their program, citing mostly concerns that it disadvantaged certain groups of students, Princeton and our own University followed suit. While eliminating early decision and early action programs hasn’t exactly caught on like wildfire thus far, it certainly made schools across the country take a second look at their admissions processes.
So when Harvard Law School decided this past week to overhaul its entire grading system, it was a big deal. To put it concisely, faculty will no longer give letter grades, instead offering a modified pass-fail method with four possible marks: Honors, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail. Traditionally, most law schools have used the same grading system we’re familiar with here at the University, with letter grades and pluses and minuses. When and where this practice changes, if it does, a legal education and its job placement sequence could change fundamentally.
There are reasons to believe a widespread changeover won’t happen. For one, HLS isn’t pioneering this trend, but is simply switching to a style of grading that Yale Law School has used since the 1960s. Additionally, Stanford Law announced in May that it would take up this method. In that sense, it isn’t a revolutionary idea; it’s been around for a while. Still, you can bet that if Harvard is altering its game, other schools will give pass-fail a second look.
The reasons are there, particularly for the top tier of law schools. In Wednesday’s edition, The Cavalier Daily quoted Virginia Law School Dean Paul Mahoney as saying, “I think Harvard believes it was in severe competition with Yale and Stanford, and they must have believed they were losing some students for having a different grading system.” That’s not at all difficult to fathom. In this age of the all-important college rankings, attracting top-notch applicants is do or die. If students like the idea of easing the competitive pressures associated with letter grading, there is considerable reason to cater to their wishes. For this reason, one can expect institutions such as Columbia and NYU Law to start feeling the heat.
Here at the University, things don’t appear set to change anytime soon. In the aforementioned article, Mahoney indicates Virginia Law will keep its current practices in place, and also indicates he doesn’t think the trend will catch on nationally. For schools outside the elite top five or so, this is probably a smart move. While letter grades are undoubtedly an imperfect indicator of academic performance and intellectual capabilities, they are an indicator nevertheless. When law firms and companies consider which budding attorney to hire, some sort of differentiation of students is needed. Students from Harvard, Yale, and the like will always be in demand. For everyone else, reducing grades to a pass-fail status (even the more sophisticated four-tier version) will only make the selection of qualified lawyers that much harder for firms. In the competitive marketplace for legal talent, law schools don’t want to make hiring their alumni any more challenging or demanding than it needs to be.
Still, there are compelling reasons to reevaluate the current method. Most importantly, some professors believe that letter grades are often doled out somewhat arbitrarily. In a public statement after adopting the new system, Stanford Law School stated that letter grades riskily “conveyed a false sense of precision in describing differences among students, especially to employers.” That’s understandable, seeing as much of the graded work is subjective in nature.
How can these competing concerns best be resolved? Perhaps some sort of compromise system can be reviewed. One plausible option is to keep the letter grades but eliminate the plus/minus marks. If some faculty has expressed concern over the degree of randomness in grading, simplifying the marks used to A, B, C, D, and F might make sense. If schools really have no interest in changing their practices at all, the very least that can be done is to study the nature of the current system more in depth. Occasionally, two or three professors could grade the same exams to measure consistency. This is already done in isolated instances, but if fairness truly is a priority, it might need to become a more widespread practice. Thus far, such an exercise has apparently not taken root at the University Law School. In an e-mail, Jim Ryan, academic associate dean at the Law School, wrote, “There are no plans that I know of to have multiple professors grade the same exam.”
In short, Harvard and Stanford have done their part by bringing some attention to the issue of fair grading. Pass-fail systems probably aren’t right for every law school, but every school should make sure the grades given are justifiable. Wouldn’t that be a good lesson to impart to the next generation of lawyers?
Ross Lawrence is a Cavalier Daily Associate Editor. He can be reached at r.lawrence@cavalierdaily.com.
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