Law Schools

Georgetown Law's Epic Grade Screw-Up

This is a bad way for GULC to earn its 15 minutes of fame.

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oops keyIt’s a time-honored tradition for law students: obsessively refreshing your grading portal or transcripts until your final grade is posted. Only then can you (hopefully) breathe a sigh of relief and get down to the business of summer.

But what if that sense of relief was misplaced? We’ve received information that at Georgetown University Law Center, the final grades posted to student transcripts… might not be correct. The grade change may put down some grades, lowering class rank, but Georgetown students are getting used to seeing their rankings drop.

Yikes. In fact, in an email to students the dean, William Treanor, called the issue “unexpected and unprecedented.” So… what exactly happened? From Dean Treanor’s email:

Normally, the law center system allows faculty to enter grades as placeholders even before they have finished grading. As a result of today’s mistake, grades at various stages of completeness were posted to transcripts in error. This premature release means that we must now go back and examine the status of all released grades. While some grades may be accurate, others were provisional or had not been reviewed by the Registrar or Associate Dean. It is possible that some grades that were posted to transcripts will change either up or down.

So, it appears that grades need to be audited to see if what has been posted to students’ transcripts is actually correct. The dean calls this review a “tremendous undertaking,” and it certainly sounds formidable. Oh, and just to double down on the stress level of the situation, graduation is this Sunday.

The school has not, as yet, released a timetable for when they expect to have this SNAFU cleared up. We can only hope — for the sake of everyone involved — it will be soon.

UPDATE: The law school has responded to our inquiry as to the scope and potential impact of the issue:

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The Law Center is working to resolve the situation. Only a limited number of classes were affected. At this time, we do not anticipate any impact on this weekend’s commencement ceremony.

Good to see they don’t anticipate an issue with graduation.

(Read the full email from Dean Treanor to the student body on the next page.)

headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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