Thoughts on the New Grading and Honors Policies at Harvard and Stanford:
As Eugene notes, the Harvard Law faculty voted to abolish its traditional grading system and move to a High/Pass/LowPass system. On a similar note, Stanford Law School, which recently enacted the same reform, decided to abolish Order of the Coif and "with distinction" diplomas and replace them with many course book awards, some retroactive.
I assume the purpose of Harvard and Stanford making these decisions is to try to get some of the Yale halo effect. Yale is the #1 school among top law school applicants, top judges, and law school hiring committees. Yale's lack of traditional grading information works to its advantage. Applicants like it, of course: No gunner law student wants to be told he is pretty much average, which is what grades tend to tell people in most cases. And the lack of information about where Yale students fit in the class often works to their advantage in the job market, as it's harder to compare Yalies to students at other schools. Employers figure, "Well, I have no idea how smart this guy is, but then, he is at Yale...." Perhaps adopting Yale's unusual grading system will attract more top students to Harvard and Stanford, and it may have a psychological impact on judges hiring clerks and committees hiring assistant professors. Or maybe it will backfire. Time will tell.
I can certainly see an advantage for the faculties at Harvard and Stanford. Fewer grading distinctions means much less time grading. Ranking a set of 100 exams into 7 or 8 different categories takes an incredible amount of time, as you need to make sure that every exam in each category isn't better than an exam in a higher category or worse than one below. But ranking is very easy if there are only three categories: Unless an exam jumps out as outstanding or terrible, it's a "pass" and you don't need to spend time on it.
As a Harvard Law alumnus, on the other hand, I admit I'm a bit saddened by the switch. One of the things I respected most about Harvard Law as a student is that it was unapologetic about its reliance on grades. When you got your grades back, you knew pretty much exactly where you stood in a very competitive class. I suppose I think something is lost in giving students and their future employers less feedback. But then I'm pretty much a traditionalist about such things: I confess to believing in the mostly unfashionable notion of meritocracy, so I tend to think the more grades, the better.
Finally, I can't help but think that Felix Frankfurter must be turning over in his grave. His beloved Harvard Law School abolishing letter grades? FF would have lost it over that one; I think he would have decided to only hire clerks from the University of Chicago.
I assume the purpose of Harvard and Stanford making these decisions is to try to get some of the Yale halo effect. Yale is the #1 school among top law school applicants, top judges, and law school hiring committees. Yale's lack of traditional grading information works to its advantage. Applicants like it, of course: No gunner law student wants to be told he is pretty much average, which is what grades tend to tell people in most cases. And the lack of information about where Yale students fit in the class often works to their advantage in the job market, as it's harder to compare Yalies to students at other schools. Employers figure, "Well, I have no idea how smart this guy is, but then, he is at Yale...." Perhaps adopting Yale's unusual grading system will attract more top students to Harvard and Stanford, and it may have a psychological impact on judges hiring clerks and committees hiring assistant professors. Or maybe it will backfire. Time will tell.
I can certainly see an advantage for the faculties at Harvard and Stanford. Fewer grading distinctions means much less time grading. Ranking a set of 100 exams into 7 or 8 different categories takes an incredible amount of time, as you need to make sure that every exam in each category isn't better than an exam in a higher category or worse than one below. But ranking is very easy if there are only three categories: Unless an exam jumps out as outstanding or terrible, it's a "pass" and you don't need to spend time on it.
As a Harvard Law alumnus, on the other hand, I admit I'm a bit saddened by the switch. One of the things I respected most about Harvard Law as a student is that it was unapologetic about its reliance on grades. When you got your grades back, you knew pretty much exactly where you stood in a very competitive class. I suppose I think something is lost in giving students and their future employers less feedback. But then I'm pretty much a traditionalist about such things: I confess to believing in the mostly unfashionable notion of meritocracy, so I tend to think the more grades, the better.
Finally, I can't help but think that Felix Frankfurter must be turning over in his grave. His beloved Harvard Law School abolishing letter grades? FF would have lost it over that one; I think he would have decided to only hire clerks from the University of Chicago.
Related Posts (on one page):
- The Psychology of Grading:
- Harvard and Stanford's Adoption of the Yale Law School Grading System:
- Thoughts on the New Grading and Honors Policies at Harvard and Stanford:
- Harvard Law Moving to Yale-Like Honors / Pass Grading System:
currently very few people get D's
so there are a b and c grades that are not being called high pass and low
unless thye announce in how they calculate GPA3- this is a distinction without a difference...as it was for Stanford.
real grade reform would require actual work (like grading a class based on more than 1 exam and thereby creating a more reliable ranking system for employers to use) so that is probably not going to happen.
This is not to say that grading is a perfect system, but if I manage to get As in all my classes, from a variety of professors, across the board, it's probably a better indicator that I get the material.
Finally, the whole thing seems odd. If people reviewing grades (judges, jobs, etc.) will take anyone from Harvard when grades are, essentially, withheld from them, why do they now (in a world where grades are available), seem to care? It must be psychological, right?
That is, if I'll hire student No. 1 when I don't know his class rank (he could be the best or the worst), why won't I hire someone with a 2.5 from Harvard?
The whole thing is absurd. H, P, all that. Dumb.
That's a pretty uncharitable assumption to hold, especially when it contradicts their stated reasons for adopting the policies. Why don't you address the reasons the schools offered?
What reasons did they offer?
Some people need to be told that they are just average. It might help them get some perspective. It's not like "average Harvard law student" is a horrible category to be placed in.
(Well, aside form the nasty Harvard thing, but then I'm a Cornell hockey fan.)
To be honest, I don't really know what this means, so it's hard to evaluate. (In particular, it does not say why the faculty believes this, or what the thinking was beyond that it would make the law school better.) Of course, if you have other statements about the specific benefits the schools offered, I hope you will share them.
At the time, these same schools had a "grade non-disclosure" policy, a version of "don't ask-don't tell" for employers and students. Honors for the top 20% and top 10% of the class were disclosed, but they weren't available until long after employers had made their interview selections.
The policy at Wharton (and I believe Harvard) was recently overturned, as it was found to discourage b-school students (easily the laziest professional school students on their best day) from taking academic pursuits seriously.
Neither do I.
This system had been in use for years and was cruel but fair. Every Texas grad knew how it worked and you knew with a high level of certainty where you ranked with your peers. Sometime later, when the market for lawyers started to suck, they changed the grading system to inflate the grades and went to an A, A- scheme allegedly in order to held the Texas grads compete better against students at other schools who received higher grades.
It is clearly not true that those at the bottom of the class understand the material as well as or put in the same studying effort as those in the top part of the class. So the effort at these schools seems to be primarily to hide the ball from employers. The fact that it reduces the professors' work load doesn't really commend it either.
Obviously neither statement is a full defense of their reasons for the change. But its easy to infer from those statements the general principles behind the change. They likely believe the changed grading system leads to more collaboration (like students in medical schools, many of which have a similar system), a greater diversity of measuring metrics (e.g. written work through the course of the term that previously would have required too much time to assign letter grades to), and students with less focus on the quest for grades.
I suspect that last point is the one with which you most disagree. But there is a legitimate argument about whether meritocracy--whatever its other advantages to employers might be--is in tension with good pedagogy. I disagree with a lot of those reasons too, but I think they can be reasonably inferred from the Dean's statements and what we know about the general debate over grading systems.
We should discuss those reasons, not reasons we invent which impugn the intentions of these deans.
The "stars" at these schools still stand out through High Passes. The biggest effect is it basically prevents the school from having to label any student below average. Harvard wants employers to see its students as members of one of two groups 1) Brilliant, top HLS students and 2) Very smart average HLS students.
The obscuring effect is on the bottom third or bottom fourth of the class -- it's going to be harder to pick these people out of the pack of HLS resumes.
Harvard, I am sure, justifies this internally by reassuring themselves even the bottom 5% of their class is super-duper wonderful, and would be superstars at State U law school, so let's help them as much as we can. I'm just not sure this is correct. Can't blame HLS for trying though.
Well, if you really "suck at the law and legal thinking" you will fail, even under this system. LSAT scores are a good predictor of bar passage rates, which if you combine with a record of solid work in law school strongly suggests the student has the makings of a good lawyer, if they apply themselves and like the work (mileage may vary). The students who truly do the best work will still have plenty of opportunities to distinguish themselves.
This program is not going to mask actual incompetence. As Orin suggests, it will mainly benefit those in the middle of the pack and probably aims to help students compete for clerkships with other top-ranked schools that also eschew the traditional grades.
If those are the statements you had in mind, your 5:25 criticism that I was being "uncharitable" by not recognizing the arguments the law schools have made strikes me as quite weak. I realize that you believe there are reasons that you think justify the change, but as far as I can tell the law schools have not made them explicitly.
Of course, it may be that those arguments that you find persuasive are indeed strong ones. I look forward to the debate on that question, and I hope Harvard and Stanford will make the case for it. It's true that based on my personal experience at HLS with ungraded courses such as "Introduction to Lawyering" and Trial Advoacy, I'm starting out skeptical. But of course I am quite open to being convinced, as my experience may have been idiosyncratic or not particularly relevant..
I agree that if we are going to debate their reasons, we need to make assumptions. But we can try to do so by extrapolating on what they said, instead of our guesses as to their true motives. I do not think it is a great leap to go from what they said to the well-known "pro" arguments for the systems they adopted.
But you've been very fair in responding to my criticism. I appreciate it.
Letter grades? Frankfurter would have rolled over in his grave at letter grades, too. As late as the late Sixties, when I finished at HLS, we received numbered grades in all classes. A mark of 75 or higher was considered the equivalent of an A; someone with a 75 average would be on law review. A mark in the high 60s was considered the equivalent of a C. So a difference in grading of six points could put you either in the stratosphere or among the great masses.
(link above to ABA Journal Online for this week - it works in my browser, but for all I know there's one of them sneaky cookiethingies that lets me in as a subscriber. If so, I apologize to those without this cookiethingiedoohickeyspybot infestation).
I was thinking of FF's discussion in Reminisces of the difference between an "A man," a "B man," and a "C man."
I'm assuming that the grading scale accurately measures the showing of lawyerly ability and skill on the exam. The number of points addressed alone does not reflect this, in my experience, as it is easy to address everything in an incoherent way or just a few things expertly.
Black and Hispanic students who clearly cannot compete intellectually are admitted to elite schools. Under the current system, such students have bad grades, because they are not as bright as their classmates. So by herding everybody into this great mass of those who "pass," schools like Harvard and Stanford can obscure the performance differential between NAMs and students admitted on merit.
Rigorous grading systems are just one more price of "diversity." The collapse of the banking system is obviously more important, but it's still a price.
Naturally, the faculty just treated these as new names for A, B, C and F.
Of course when I applied for law school 17 years later, I learned what I'd always suspected, which is that the Law School Admission Council treated the grades exactly like the faculty did and calculated a GPA for me accordingly.
Last I heard, my college had thrown in the towel, too.
I don't know about you Orin, but when I was at HLS, I didn't have the slightest freakin clue where I stood in a very competitive class. Not only did they not provide class ranks or even cut-offs particularly far into the class (I knew a B+ average was cum laude and that something few than a third of the class graduated cum laude), but they used that stupid grading system where an A was something like 11 points, an A- was 10 points, a B was 9 points, etc. So you could calculate a GPA if you wanted, but few enough people bothered to where you could compare GPAs even if you wanted. I still remember my undergrad GPA out to the thousandths of a decimal place (since it was on a 4 point scale), but I couldn't tell you what my HLS GPA was if you held a gun to my head.
Now that doesn't mean there isn't some value to the grades - graduating magna from HLS carries a certain cache in my mind that will be reduced the more they do away with grades - but for the other 70% of the class, there's not much of a difference.
On the first day of class my 1L year, one of the teachers actually told his class something along the lines of "if you can't understand something I've said, it's not because I'm going too fast, it's just because of my pedagogical excellence." The students didn't know what to think (other than that he was a really, really big douche).
Is that right? Isn't the Yalo halo effect more a result of class size?
Interesting -- my experience was very different. We knew the average grades, we knew the cut offs for cum laude and magna, and we knew roughly what it took to grade on to the law review. Plus, the 11 point grading system was just a formality: you could easily convert it into a 4 point scale if you wanted, and I generally did so after every semester to see what my GPA was. (The only difference was that an A- was a 3.6666, not a 3.7, etc.) You never knew exactly where the curve was in each section, but usually you could get a rough idea.
Harvard and Stanford don't need a "halo effect" from anybody.
????? How is that? On the current Supreme Court, there are five Harvard Law School grads (one justice attended Harvard LS but graduated from Columbia LS) and "only" two Yale LS grads. In the decade 1970-79, the Harvard Law Review was cited 4410 times in federal court opinions whereas the Yale Law Review was cited "only" 1800 times and the Columbia Law Review was cited "only" 1062 times.
BTW, IMO Volokh Conspiracy has too many posts on the same subject in too short a time, so it is hard for me to decide where to post my comments. IMO if the bloggers here have something to add within a short space of time, they should post their additions in the comments sections instead of posting a whole new article. This would also keep down the total number of articles and thus help prevent the articles from too quickly moving down the home page and off the home page.