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Should You Brag About Your Law School Grades On Facebook?

Facebook is obliterating our old rules about what is and is not appropriate to talk about.

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In a way, I’m surprised we don’t have more stories about people posting their grades on social media sites. The kids are already using Facebook and Twitter as a running diary of their lives, so you’d expect there to be more instances where people throw their law school transcripts up on the internet.

In fact, let me ask the question this way: why wouldn’t you post your grades on Facebook? They’re clearly important to you. If you did well, you can brag about them just as surely as one of your friends is bragging about the exploits of their kids or dogs. If you did poorly, you can seek the solace of friends who you don’t actually like well enough to have a beer with. Why wouldn’t you post them?

The obvious answers seem painfully old-timey. “It’s in poor taste to brag about your grades.” “Your transcript should be private.” “You got an ‘A’? Go f**k yourself.” These are the thoughts of a previous generation. For the Facebook generation… I mean, have you seen what people post? This is nothing.

A law student decided to post his solid grades on Facebook. I bet you can guess what school we’re talking about. Let’s just say that it’s a school that seems to admit students who like to draw attention to themselves when things are going well by subtly upturning their collars….

Yeah, we’re talking about UVA Law because that’s where this kind of thing is most likely to happen. A law student there posted his recent grades on his Facebook page. Here was the initial post sent to us by a tipster:

A few things jump out from this posting:

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  • Thank you for your service.
  • It’s not really “bragging” if you got Bs.
  • He’s only a first year.

Look, if I saw this from one of my Facebook friends, I’d simply respond like this and move on:

But other people at UVA Law were annoyed by this perceived self-aggrandizement. That inspired our guy to make a follow-up Facebook post:

“Deprive non-law school friend of updates about my life” is the new killing it.

Again, this wouldn’t be something I would do, but this is how people use social media. It’s UVA! I bet this isn’t even the most “look at how special I am” Facebook post by a UVA law student since I started writing this story. I reached out to the guy (via Facebook) who posted his grades, but he has not yet responded. I assume he’s somewhere trying to figure out why so many people care that he posted his grades on Facebook while simultaneously firm in his belief that his 1L grades were an appropriate starting point for a public Facebook discussion. It’s the world we live in.

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In the battle between propriety and Facebook, Facebook wins. Facebook won. People better get used to seeing this kind of thing, at least from 1Ls who don’t yet know any better.

Should people post their grades on Facebook?

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