2L, I think one of the things we should be teaching is how to persuade people who have some authority over you. Like judges and senior partners and clients. You think they'll be more receptive to such an email than Gordon was?

Gordon, I look forward to the substantive post. I've toyed with the idea of graded group assignments, and am currently leaning against, but maybe you can persuade me otherwise.

Chad!

Good point... read the first line?

"Students are customers, and they have every right to complain about poor service, unprofessional behavior, and out-of-date material."

So, I'm pretty sure the student is calling out Prof. Smith for (what he believes is )poor service. Instead of addressing the student's point (or "concerns"), he attacks how the email was written. Great job.

Why not offer to meet with the student?

Thanks for posting this - I usually have at least one student a year who opts to communicate with me via confrontational emails, and I learned a lot about how to handle such emails in the future from your response.

2L,

Always read the entire memo or document. Selective reading will never assist you in any of your endeavors. I hope you become a better lawyer than a student.

Gordon,
I actually agree with your observations that the current model does not promote learning as much as it does the current system that provides easier grading and an easy baseline whittling function for law firms at OCI.
My main point of interest was that I found it interesting that you had only experienced this sort of confrontation from a student only a few times before in your teaching career. In my three years at BYU law, I saw it all the time. Yes, every one is nice, and civil, and great. I really enjoyed my time at BYU. No questions about that. However, get between a student or even worse, a group of them and their grade prospects, however faulty those grading systems may be, and they feel rather justified in being "aggressive" advocates.
It would be interesting to poll your colleagues who have been at BYU a bit longer how many time in their career they have had to deal with aggressive students.

On a related note, yes, those who have cracked the exam writing code (IE: those in the top of the class, and by extension law professors) tend to think that the system works just fine. Why wouldn't they? It elevates them above 90% of their classmates and provides them a measure of economic security and opportunity.

What effect on learning does the system have on the middle of the class students, you know that massive chunk where most law students find themselves.

BYU seems like it might be an interesting place to study the effects on learning, given the economic consequences of learning, and by extension, performance, which cannot be ignored.

BYU seems to be turning into one of those "in between" schools, as pointed out by RJS, moving away from the law school it used to be (must be top 10% for a top law firm offer), and more towards a pseudo-national law school, where top 30 or 40% may be good enough to land you a job at a top law firm.

The students at either end of the grade distribution have clear feedback on their learning efforts. Its the big chunk in the middle that are left wondering why they did so well in contracts but bombed in con law, even though their efforts and output seemed relatively equal. It was sad to see this grading model crush their spirits and dreams over the course of our 2l and 3l years. Some dealt with it and moved on, some gave up. Many disengaged from learning simply because they couldn't figure out what it was they were supposed to learn or show.

Anyway, I applaud your efforts to alter the status quo and experiment with alternative and hopefully more effective (for a greater percentage of the student body) learning models. Best of luck in your work in that department.

Just by way of information, nothing in my approach to this class will change the fact that the median grade is a 3.3, and nothing will change the fact that at least one student will get a 4.0. (These are BYU's minimalist grade guidelines.) Moreover, I strongly suspect that the distribution of grades will resemble a bell curve, just as it has done in every other class I have ever taught.

So what is the basis of the objection to implementing team assignments that are graded as a team? The most sympathetic objection would be that the system is unfair in the sense that it doesn't reward outstanding individual performance.

In this context, that is not a weighty objection, as only 15% of the grade is based on team assignments. The remainder of the grade is based on individual performance, including a traditional final exam. Also, I do not impose a curve on the grading of team assignments.

The more general response, however, is that the objection privileges outstanding individual performance over teamwork. Team assignments probably reward different skills than those rewarded by traditional exams, and I believe that we should reward students for developing skills other than the skill of writing a timed, essay exam. Among the skills that law students would benefit from developing is the ability to work in teams.

"Instead of addressing the student's point (or "concerns"), he attacks how the email was written. Great job."

Not that Gordon needs anyone to make any points for him, but unless I read his original post and comments wrong, Gordon DID address the substance of the student's email, AND in any case I would add that it is quite appropriate for Gordon to address how the email was written. In fact, in this case I would argue that addressing this student's approach was more important and likely produced a more valuable learning experience than any discussion of grading and teaching methods would have produced.

RE: group work - In school I found that my interaction with the group depended entirely upon whether it affected my grade. If the work was graded, I didn't hesitate to dominate and demand competence and hard work from the group. If it was not graded, I still worked hard, but I simply let my classmates think or do whatever they felt like doing.

In any case, I applaud any professor who is willing to stretch himself and risk open criticism to create a better education for his students.

Speaking from recent experience, however, as much as law students realize the "status quo" is deficient in many ways, I think we all generally feared the spectre of change far more than any of us feared the traditional model we were conditioned to in the first year of law school.

On that note, it strikes me that perhaps the best arena for testing and effecting change in the traditional law school educational model is in first year courses with students who, on the whole, have not yet been conditioned to a particular process.

The first year that I taught LRW, we had a group project with a group grade. A high-performing student came in to complain about another student and was very concerned that he was going to drag down her grade. At this school (Texas Tech), the vast, vast majority of the students would stay in the state to practice, and many would stay in the same city. I tried to point out to her that at some point students need to see their fellow students as future colleagues. I can't tell you how many times in practice we interviewed lateral candidates from my alma mater. I hope that we would not have been so short-sighted as to "slash" our teammates grades. After a few years out, your grades are less important than the positive impressions you have created on with whom you have worked and gone to school. That being said, the law school curve is a pedagogical impediment to group work, which is much more prevalent in business schools, even though much of legal practice is group work.

I also wanted to pick out the comment that the world is very different from the world in which Gordon went to law school. This particular saw needs to be reworked somewhat. I graduated from law school in 1993, in a recession, in an environment where law schools cut back first-year summer programs, hired 50% of their summer classes, and laid off associates in the middle of the summer. We also liked to say that when the people who were hiring us graduated from law school, everyone got a job at Biglaw. That statement doesn't hold up to proof today in 2008, and I doubt it held up to proof in 1993. Maybe the students in 1978 said the same thing as well.

As a non-lawyer, I have no comment on grades. I do have a comment on the cult indoctrination aspects of law school. This professor invites students to leave. Shunning is cult.

The job of law school is to make modern, intelligent people believe in garbage core doctrines. After 1L, they come to believe minds can be read, the future forecast, and the gut feelings of 12 people off the street can detect the truth. Not the knowledge of 12 people, the gut. Anyone with knowledge has been excluded. And then there are the words, element, and reasonable. These come from a church, and violate the Establishment Clause. Reasonable means, in accordance with the New Testament, and is unlawful.

So intimidation, and fear of shunning are standard tools of the criminal cult indoctrinator leading the class.

This prof thinks any questioning of his methods is rude and will cause the student trouble if repeated outside. He is absolutely correct. Any questioning will get crushed the most powerful, richest, slickest lawyer, with no recourse. Criminal cult enforcement gets draconian, and leaves no room for any challenge.

Perhaps I am one of very few who was actually excited to see something different from Prof. Smith in his class this semester. My grades are good, I have interviews from top law firms, and I consider myself better than average at managing the "traditional" testing and grading system of law school. At the same time, I see the folly in basing an entire semester's grade on three pressure-packed hours of idiosyncratic testing, with advantages given to fast typists and outline-dumpers.

The real world is nothing like that, for better or worse. Peers are a fixture in real legal work, and whether we like it or not we better learn to thrive in that type of system. Prof. Smith's grading system provides a broad range of grading criteria that represent a solid reflection of a student's ability to succeed in a real working environment.