pretzles

So in other words, now HLS students really don't have to do ANYTHING and will still be viewed as the cream of the crop because they can take an LSAT test that proves nothing. Gone are the easy A's that are handed out; now there isn't even an incentive to go to class. And these graduates clerk on the SCOTUS? Give me a break!

3 : we are just better than everyone else

-HLS Grad

What the hell is this? What is wrong with just giving grades?

Now our Bs at CLS are going to look even worse.

I wish I was a SCROTUS clerk.

Can someone summarize how all the other Ivy League schools grade? Most state schools I know (e.g., Michigan, UVA, Penn) still just give a number grade.

4: and arrogant, too.

-Turned down HLS for full scholarship at T1 school

3: An A was never easy at HLS.

I wish they would not have announced this just as I am taking my mediocre transcript into OCI....it makes me feel kind of bitter.

3: Amen.

Honors = A
Pass = B
Low Pass = C
Fail = Elie

This would only be an improvement if there was also a decrease in the number of As/Honors given.

Can CLS follow suit?

UVA grades on the popped collar scale.

Michigan grades on the fat, ugly disgusting sandwich stealing scale.

Penn doesn't grade anymore because they were just dissolved after losing too many IP professors to GULC.

"Can someone summarize how all the other Ivy League schools grade?"

Only HYS grade pass fail, but I heard that some of the other Ivies, such as Hofstra, GULC and Boston College, are soon to follow suit.

9: terrible decision.

Hofstra will most certainly follow suit now that they are in the top 100 and all.

Agree with 5 -- this is lame.

-HLS '04

I got an "Elie" in Con Law at my TTT.

15: I thought UPenn State-Philly Campus gives grades based on the number of games the Nittany Lions win in the season.

HYS can get away with no grades because even the bottom of the class is coveted.

What are they going to do with the honors? Any clue on whether magna cum laude and cum laude will remain top 10% and top 40%?

3: jealousy is a stinky cologne. as you may or may not know, you need a lot more than just an lsat score to get into HLS. oh, and frankly, there was no incentive to go to class even when they were giving out letter grades.

21, if they do, it's going to be a good year for Penn students!

Duke also changed their grading policy.

Any idea how 1Ls will be graded this term?

Duke also changed its grading policy to a similar system.

Can I get my C in 1L year retroactively changed to a "low pass"? Just sounds better.

15 - You are an idiot. Go back to your ttt whore of school you were spawned from and leave commenting to the big boys.

UPenn Alum.

What did Duke do and when?

When did Duke change? Do we have the email of what they did as well?

17: debt-free here. Go pound some salt.

Can we also get the J.D. degree changed into a Certificate of Completion?

Disagree with this decision. The degree meant something in part because we couldn't just show up and get a bunch of "passes." In fact, I really liked it that Harvard was holding onto grades even when Yale and Stanford didn't - it allowed magna and cum laude grads at HLS to distinguish themselves with potential employers (and especially appellate judges.) I'm glad that my transcript has grades on it - even though there are one or two grades that I'd whiteout if I could.

- HLS '06

Any insight as to whether Mississippi College of Law is going to change their grading system?

Was at a party a couple of years back in Boston, several HLS kids were there. There was a keg. Two of the HLS kids held up the third so he could show off his keg stand skills. His two friends were drunker than he thought and dropped him by accident face first into the keg. Broke the tap. Bloodied face. Three HLS kids left party. Laughs were had by all.

In retrospect, I wish captain keg face was Mystal.

Sincerely,

Suck it, Mystal.

Any info on whether Mississippi College of Law intends to change its grading scale?

Thanks.

The only way that women and minorities have been able to break into the club at many places is by having grades better than the white males they are competing against. To achieve this, even fine distinctions have been helpful. An A is better than an A-. By far. The faculty has wiped out an important route of upward mobility.

Maybe Chicago will be next?? 177+ = "honors pass"?

Joe Biden would still have received a "low pass" under this system, but would have claimed Honors-Pass status.

Once a lying dirtbag, always a lying dirtbag.

HYS is smart to do this as it allows their students to get whatever jobs they want as opposed to having to justify B's. NYU and CLS will have to follow suit or they will never be able to compete with HYS (assuming they currently can for some students_.

At NYU or CLS, if you have mostly B's and B+s you won't make a lot of firm's grade cutoffs and are unlikely to get a t-10 offer. I know my firm has a strict cutoff. However, under the HYS system your grades will only be distinguishable for clerkships and for a few grade conscious firms such as Wachtell. No one else will care about the high pass, pass distinction.

I passed the LSAT, so I should be admitted into Harvard and Yale.

43:

But was it a high or low pass?

which is worse? Hofstra or Pace. Discuss.

I think UC Berkeley (Boalt) is also Honors-Pass-Fail standard. Damn Hippies.

39: How about diversity initiatives? Firms are competing to grab the minorities and career-track women. If you're a URM, the grade cut-offs are much lower than they are for whites.

During a meet'n'drink recruiting function last year a member of the recruiting staff told me that the firm was very interested in a particular URM 2L. When I asked why, she didn't have an answer. He couldn't have wowwed people with great interviews, because it was before OCI. Also couldn't have amazing grades, since his school didn't allow him to send his grades before OCI. The only difference between him and the other students was his race.

33 - Congrats on being debt free. However, you will also likely be "Partner Free" due to your TTT schooling. Good Day.

If you take a dump in Nassau county in comes out in the 1L classrooms at Hofstra.

Suck it, Hofstra.

tall kids will now get ALL the best jobs

Knight School of Law does not give out grades either. I got my Doctor of Lawology there, without booking a single class, and have way better job prospects than a GULC.

Wow, everyone's copying Northeastern School of Law and their lack of grades! Northeastern to bartending!

Right on, 13. I always thought it was dumb that these schools said, "We don't have GRADES, we just have four categories." Then it just so happens that the curve that we use to award them is remarkably similar to the old one for A, B, C, D.

On the other hand, this makes our system at Chicago system look more and more retarded.

I don't understand why this matters. The people with the best grades are still going to be the ones selected for fancy clerkships and the rest will all still get great jobs. Why not just make it simple and use a general A,B,C, etc. grade system. This latest trend in law school grading is simply to try to make the uptight student body relax a little.

3 is right, the LSAT doesn't demonstrate anything except your speed and ability at basic logic and reading comprehension. Really, who cares about such things?

Seriously though, having no penalty for wrong answers is reTTTarded.

It's pretty dumb for schools to spend all this time changing the names they call their grades without changing how the grades are earned.

Exams, especially closed book tests, are a pretty poor measure of your legal aptitude. Small quizzes given throughout the semester would be much better. Being able to see where you're going wrong early on would be more condusive to learning the material, as would bar exam style multiple choice questions.

It's a shame that law professors spend more time pretending to be philosophers than training their students to be lawyers.

Western New England Law School lets you grade yourself. (And GULC yourself if you feel so inclined.)

Touro Touro Touro

"The faculty believes that this decision will promote pedagogical excellence and innovation and further strengthen the intellectual community in which we all live."

The faculty also believes that this decision will result in significantly less work for them.

6- I hear ya.

CLS, do something!!!

"less complicated then Stanford's" ?

FAIL

To repeat the question from earlier -- anyone have any intuitions as to whether this will apply to 1L grades (class of 2011) this year?

The email leaves open a number of possibilities. Seems like under the wording 2Ls and 3Ls (2010 and 2009) could have their grading system switched immediately. Half A/B/C, half pass/fail.

Maybe they should reclassify all of the old 2L and 3L grades into P's.

I understand people who say that these just map on to an A-B-C-D system, but under traditional grading systems, + / - distinctions can be important. In the B-range, for example, if you collapse everything from a B- (2.7) to a B+ (3.3) into just a B (3.0), that's going to significantly change things. If a school that gave 4.3 for an A+ did this, it would have a particularly significant impact among top students.

My secretary said that when she was at Hofstra Law they tried to implement this policy but it didn't fly.

61 - The email doesn't say anything about 2009 or 2010 (that was Elie). Presumably, everyone currently enrolled *could* have the new system enacted in a way that would affect them (2009, 2010, and 2011).

If a professor wants to give out only A, B, C and D letter grades, and no + or - grades, he is free to do so in order to "promote pedagogical excellence and innovation and further strengthen the intellectual community". There is no reason for the school to completely eliminate finer distinctions between students and dumb down differentiation between students.

Why don't they just move to P/F while they're at it. It will be a liberal socialist paradise where everybody will be a winner and everyone will be equal.

65,

Pedagogical excellence = Hope
Innovation and further strengthening the intellectual community = Change

Enough said on the great substantive merits of this plan...

8: Subtly brilliant

-fellow UPenn State troll

Boalt--er, "Berkeley Law"-- has had a Honors/Pass system (actually High Honors/Honors/Pass) system for nearly 40 years. And guess what? It's the the only law school (apart from Yale) to forgo graduation honors in place of "book awards" that signal first- or second-highest course grades.

I don't mind top law schools copying our system. But they should at least acknowledge that they're copying from Berkeley, and not use this "some other law schools" crap.

I see a few close posts...but really people??
Does nobody realize the only real issue is whether D's will now be low pass or fail? An issue which I doubt anybody really cares about anyway.
Scholarships might also be a problem but clerkships & firms will still be fine.

64 -- I know there is no specific mention. I was going off of:

"yet to be determined is whether it also will apply to some or all classes of current students."

I don't see any way they could re-classify old grades. Seeing as how 1L grades are all that count for OCI, it's hard to see how upperclassmen would care. Presumably the kids gunning for clerkships have good grades and wouldn't want the switch; slackers would be done with OCI and indifferent.

The real test will be for 1L's this year. I hope we get it, but I doubt that we will. It's hard to imagine they'd get the ball rolling for classes that have already been going on for a month. Hopefully I'm wrong.

I'm torn about the switch in general. As a slacker/beneficiary, I'm all for it. But I also see the need to be able to differentiate among the class.

Speaking of photoshop, is there a program in existence that can do something about this face??

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/rids/20080925/i/r3338871921.jpg?x=400&y=266&q=85&sig=ivYxQa8eifOHiiOgFTS5kg--

She's starting to look worse than Michael Jackson.

Paperbag 1.0 should do the trick for that.

Good thing I go to an Ivy school

- 1L at UPenn State

Another decade of heavy tanning will clear that complexion right up...

CLS to 190!!!!!

My school, DePaul Law School, stopped giving out grades this semester also. They just tell you to give yourself a "pat on the back for a job well done" after you take the exam. When you graduate they don't give out diplmas either--just directions to the nearest unemployment agency office.

how does this post affect associates at WILDMAN HARROLD??

Suck it Hofstra.

GULC5L

I've heard alot about WILDMAN lately--does anyone know about them?

48:

I work in the judiciary. You'd never be hired by me, I can assure you that.

50: Great, underappreciated insight.

This all stems from a serious misunderstanding about Yale and its grading system. Yale has grades. The H/P system really is an evaluative system, and it does help to distinguish graduates in the eyes of certain employers and among all federal judges. There are other factors, too, but the grades are important.

Harvard and Stanford are changing their systems because (a) they think it will help them to attract students who they believe were heading to Yale because there are "no grades" there, and (b) because they also know that they will maintain the ability to differentiate between students in a meaningful way, despite the outward appearance that this kind of competition will now be a thing of the past.

They are wrong on the first count, so long as students will actually visit the schools and talk to the students to learn about the cultures. Yale has a special, largely non-competitive atmosphere because the student body is small, more selective, highly coveted in all areas, and diverse enough in its interests and job ambitions that the students can maintain their high desirability in each area of the market.

As to the second count, of course, they are right. Harvard, for instance, with a class so large, knows that it must maintain a meaningful method of differentiation in order to satisfy employers and judges. There are extra-curricular opportunities, sure, but classroom performance must be the primary variable in any differentiating function at such a large institution. So, we should look past this change in the grading system and recognize that it is not going to change either the culture or the needs of HLS.

I am not saying any of this to suggest that HLS is an awful, hyper-competitive place. It is not. But what ever happened to maintaining a differentiated product? If Harvard wants to steal Yale-bound students, it should provide a superior, different product, not a Yale-wanna-be try at a non-conventional grading system that will give false claim to uniformity among their prospectives and graduates.

YLS

WILDMAN is the best litigation firm in the midwest.

68: Boalt does have graduation honors, e.g., Coif.

Law schools are jokes. Grades are bad because they rank people? The wimpification of America continues. Tools.

As a HLS student, I am embolded that our dignified school has the audacity and courage to make this bold step that surely will mark a seachange in legal pedgagory. I deeply believe that every HLS student who looks around at the student body recognizes the academic strength, intellectual integrity and amazing depth of throat that distinguises our law school from every other institution in the country. Therefore, in recongition of this, the illustrious facullty has made the farsighted decision to end the tyranny of grades. I am beeming about my school now, to speak honestly. And, I believe that the "haters" who criticize us are hackneyed, as they usually are. Look deep into yourselves and examine if perhaps your sentiments do not reflect jealousy.

" I look forward to seeing you some of you there."

Really? Is that how they write at HLS? Nice grammar.

does cum laude still mean "top" 75%/80%, or has that rigorous honor been tighted to "top" 60%?

(yes kids - many of those HLS "cum laude" types you see are top 75% of their class - wow!)

88, cum laude at HLS means top 40%, minus the top 10% who are magna cum laude.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/academics/registrar/2007-08/honors_cutoffs_2008.php

Perhaps you're thinking of the undergraduate school. It's understandably easy for Cooley students to get the two confused.

I know it's embarrassing to be completely wrong but I'm sure you'll get over it.

Ok. 1) 86 is clearly someone trying to make HLS kids sound stupid.

2) This is very bad news top HLS students, but correspondingly good news for the rest of us. Most employers would agree that the top 180 kids at HLS (about the top third, plus law review kids - many of whom have average grades) are better prospects both in terms of practical know-how as well as raw brainpower than the YLS graduating class. Most would similarly agree that the average YLS grad is more desirable than the average HLS grad. Anything that reduces the ability of the cream to rise within HLS hinders the capacity of its top students to compete with YLS grads for clerkships etc.

3) 2 is only negated if this (as well as other moves, including poaching top faculty members and the public service initiative thing) substantially enhances the pool of students who matriculate to Harvard.

Too much of a gambit in my opinion.

- Middle of my class at HLS

The faculty must love this, since they don't have to put as much effort in grading exams and papers

I wonder how many people who are accepted to Yale this year will enroll at Harvard instead b/c of this. I bet it might convince a few.

92 -- a few maybe, but I wouldn't think too many. Even with the grade change, YLS is still the undisputed top dog. Everyone knows that getting into Yale means you also got into Harvard, but the reverse is definitely not the case.

Also, it's much more prestigious being one of a very select group of 180 vs. one of a giant ass class of 550, where it's virtually guaranteed that many of your classmates were accepted purely on numbers. The size difference also hurts in terms of competition for jobs, clerkships, etc. With so many fewer YLS students than HLS ones, the Yale kid stands out much more than the Harvard one. HLS is a diploma factory -- albeit a high-prestige one, but still a diploma factory.

Lastly, YLS has been known to have a very collegial, cooperative type of atmosphere whereas HLS... yeah... not so much... If you're looking for less stress and get into both schools, odds are you're taking Yale. The only rational justification for taking Harvard is if you're really interested in some obscure subject that HLS has electives on, but YLS doesn't. Otherwise, it's a pretty dumb move.

Sorry, Harvard -- you're not Yale and this stunt isn't helping you get that much closer. If anything, having a giant class increases the need for GPAs / ranks to separate out the wheat from the chaff. Good job screwing over the 100 or so kids in the top quarter / third of the class who just miss the honors / high pass marks.

This probably means that the Harvard Law Review will now select entirely on the writing competition. Hard to know what the implications will be. . . . Another effect: there will presumably be no Latin honors. However, because it will take a while for it to become generally known in the legal community that HLS no longer follows a traditional grading system, for some time it will be assumed of all post-2009 HLS graduates, including those who otherwise would have received Latin honors, that their lack of Latin honors on their resumes means that they didn't have what it takes to get Latin honors.

HOW WILL THIS AFFECT SCOTUS CLERKSHIPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

I would challenge the presumption of so many YLS boosters that one's career prospects are at all improved by going to Yale as opposed to excelling at Harvard. As a rough and sexy indicator of such success, let's look at SCOTUS clerkship placement. 74 from HLS since 2000, with 54 from Yale. There is absolutely no question that each and every one of those from HLS graduated in the top 180 of his of her class. To compare HLS's top 180 to YLS, however, is flawed in that it assumes that every YLS kid would have done well at Harvard. As a rough and anecdotal mode for criticizing this assumption, I have several friends who came to HLS over YLS (about 1 in 5 who get into both do), and all are solid B students here. Thus, before this monkey business, the career-maximizing choice for those facing this enviable situation seemed to be: if you're confident that you will be a truly excellent law student, go to HLS and excel; if you're not sure, the risk-adverse thing would be to go to YLS and suffer slightly lower prospects, but also at a much lower risk. We law students are a risk-adverse bunch, and so most choose the latter. Also, there's the laziness factor: Obama surely worked a helluva lot harder in law school than Bubba Clinton.

Thus, this move, while probably marginally bumping up the 1 in 5 number, will likely harm top students at HLS. This leads me to believe that the motivation for the switch was more to compete with Stanford than Yale.

It seems that the sensitive flowers attending these schools are more easily bruised by critique than their more robust counterparts.

Top law programs in Europe not have an A-F grading system, but include the grade of H - which is a clear fail. They also give these grades out (thankfully not to me).

96, you've just made the damning comparison yourself -- "GOING to Yale as opposed to EXCELLING at Harvard." Can anyone really be confident that they're going to be a "truly excellent law student" at one of the top 2-3 law schools in the country? No matter how smart, motivated, confident you are, that's simply a losing proposition.

This argument is similar to picking between a T14 school and a T30 school that's offering you a giant scholarship. Sure, if you're truly an excellent law student at the T30, you'll receive opportunities basically as good as you'd get at the T14. However, that's exactly what everyone going to the T30 is thinking and many students receive a rude awakening once they get their first semester grades and are right at the median.

The same argument applies for Yale - Harvard. Sure, if you're in the top-third of HLS, you're going to be very competitive with YLS students for the top jobs, clerkships, but what happens if you aren't? And while I'm sure there are some slackers at HLS, the school has much more of a reputation for type A students so I'm guessing a good 70-80% of the class is shooting to be in the top third and compete for those elite opportunities. Those aren't good odds to say the least.

No, my argument was premised on the observation that top HLS grads have BETTEr career prospects (not "very competitive") than the undifferentiated YLS grad, at least in areas outside of legal academia. Interpret the comment within the Harvard-eliminates-grades context and I think you'll see what I'm getting at.

The T14/T30 analogy is inapt, as the central issue I'm pointing to is that lack of grades makes it relatively more difficult to project an image of objectively-demonstrable achievement at Yale. Thus, it is difficult to define what a "top YLS grad" is. Since the top HLS grad is probably smarter and more capable than the "average" YLS grad and almost all YLS grads seem "average" on paper, a top HLS grad is a more attractive emloyee/clerk/whatever than their Yale counterparts.

The objection is thus: by eliminating grades, HLS is reducing the competitive advantage its top students currently have vis a vis YLS grads. This initiative only makes sense in this respect if it significantly affects its matriculation rate. On this point I agree: Harvard is just too big for such a ploy to work. Our top 50% of admitted kids already have way higher LSAT scores, grades etc. than YLS and SLS. If the school's institutional priority is to be "the best" in terms of who it admits, it could simply halve its class sizes. On the other hand, if it wants to continue to be the big kahuna - the law school with the most resources, largest impact on both the real world and the development of legal doctrine, and with the most rigorously-trained student body - this was a bad move.

Why are law students so obsessed with prestige? You never hear people having these kinds of arguments about Harvard/Yale undergrad or Harvard/Wharton B-school. It's just understood that you're all incredibly lucky and can leave and go do whatever the hell you want in life. Distinctions at this level are all about ego.

"You never hear people having these kinds of arguments about Harvard/Yale undergrad"

Really? USNews incites the argument every single year and the debate even spills over into actual (read: not college) newspaper articles -- ones about how unhappy Harvard undergrads are relative to those at the other Ivies: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/03/29/student_life_at_harvard_lags_peer_schools_poll_finds/ and about how insecure Cornell undergrads are about their prestige: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/nyregion/22image.html come to mind.

If there's more debate among law students, it probably has to do with many of us competing for the same firm jobs, clerkships, etc. after law school. Undergrads end up on too many different paths to make comparisons as important. Also, you're posting on a website devoted to prestige, elite law schools, elite firm jobs, etc. A borderline unhealthy obsession with these things is expected, almost encouraged.

98, there are some of us who figure we'll do better than others at the school we choose to go to. Why? Because we didn't study for the LSAT, work hard in undergrad, or put much effort at all into the application process. We still got 170+ LSATs, 3.7+ GPAs and were accepted into top schools. It isn't a losing proposition when you stack all the cards in your favor by just not putting in any effort and still being top-dog. I did this and knew I'd come out on top of the school I chose to attend.

I look forward to seeing you some of you there.

Elena Kagan, Harvard - TTT

Last year, the HLS faculty essentially got rid of the long-lived 3L paper requirement. You can still write a 3L paper for credit if you want, but now you can also satisfy the requirement with regular work you've probably already done: two seminar papers, or two journal articles, or two "series of response papers," or any combination thereof. Bascially, it's like satisfying the 3L paper requirement based on life experience.

The change was obviously made at the insistance of professors who were sick of "advising" students on crappy mandatory 3L papers that nobody cared about. And now that they've had a taste of it, they've gone fromdemanding that they be released from reading 3L papers to demanding that they stop giving out grades entirely. Nice. The value of my magna cum laude just went up.

89

what were the cut offs for HLS cum laude in say the mid to late 90s?

thanks in advance

HLS graduation honors prior to June 1999:
Summa cum laude = 7.20 and above
Magna cum laude = 5.70 to 7.199
Cum laude = 4.85 to 5.799
(on an 8.0 grading scale)

To speak briefly to the question of why someone would choose to go to HLS over YLS:

I am heading off to HLS next year, and didn't even bother applying to YLS. It's not because I don't think I could get in (in addition to the numbers, I have the kinds of 'distinguishing' soft factors necessary). I just want to get out of New Haven. As a Yale undergrad, I have found these four years to be among the best of my life. At the same time, I'm ready for a change of scenery. Having spoken to some of my classmates who are heading to HLS next year, a number of them didn't apply to YLS either, citing the same desire to get out of New Haven.