Law school is going well for me. I've been very surprised that I can enjoy the nuances and uncertainties of the law. It's fascinating really. And since I haven't had a job to burden my free time, I've had plenty of time to study and actually do the readings (possibly a first in my college experience). But, law school is not all "kicks and giggles." While I really love the subject, I'm not such a fan of the process. Let me explain.
Everything in law school is graded on a curve. Sure, I had plenty of undergraduate classes that claimed to be on a curve, but they weren't really. In almost every case, the professors would only use a curve to inflate grades, never to force an artificial ranking of the students. But that is what law school does. I've heard that Harvard (and perhaps Yale?) have done away with grades and I think that is brilliant. However, BYU argues that if they were to do away with grades the employers would go elsewhere. The big firms apparently like these artificial rankings.
Grades truly aren't my concern. It is being judged on how you do compared to everyone else. The professors/TA's try to comfort students by telling us that we are all brilliant, but then why rank? It seems to be a silly way to extend the adversarial profession into academia. And how accurate can a class rank really be? Let me illustrate.
The only feedback I have so far is in my Property class where we had real midterms that counted towards our grade (every other class is based 100% on the final) and here's how the grades look (I couldn't help but graph it):
Notice that almost everyone in the class has a 90% and above. Now how can you honestly tell me that someone with a 95% is so much better than someone with a 93%? And we're not talking about saying they are marginally better. That 2% drop in grade is a 20% drop in class ranking, where the employer's really look (or so I'm told).Ironically, in Property we are learning about all of these legal rules that we adopted from the English that are outdated and kept just because of tradition, not because they make sense. And after criticizing the legal system we keep something almost as ridiculous just because it has been around in law schools forever. Let's just cut the stress of intense competition and get to what really matters, learning to practice the law.
Anyway, that's my rant of the day. If you made it this far, thanks for listening.
That really does sound stupid. For a bunch of logical people this is a pretty illogical system. Certainly one that doesn't produce optimal results.
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