As you rightly note, there are (even for Yale students) limited numbers of clerkships, limited numbers of fancy jobs, and so forth. So there's always going to be some kind of competition. Without grades, students compete for faculty recommendations. This means that those who are best at pleasing professors personally do the best. This is just as arbitrary, or more so, than grades, and might sort for rather unpleasant types, and pass over people who might be just as qualified but not as good at befriending law professors.

One thing that grades help to flag is which students are less likely to pass the bar exam and therefore which students need extra help while in law school. There are lots of "pass" students who might not be identified as students who need help with their essay writing or legal analysis skills. At more elite law schools, bar passage rates are not a problem. However, outside of the elite schools bar passage rates become more of an issue. Given that many students shell out over $100,000 at private law schools or in out of state tuition at state schools, at the very least we have a duty to make sure that they have the chance of practicing law.

I wonder how much of the answer depends on where the "sorting function" occurs at a given school and for which purpose. For some jobs (perhaps adjusted for the times) the sort might occur upon receipt of the acceptance letter (at the elite schools) but only upon making law review or top 10% first-year class rank at others and then only upon some other benchmark at a third. Makes you wonder when law schools will start purposefully trying to target different "end user" markets rather than all pretending to serve a common market. What would happen to second or third tier schools who gave up on first tier placements as a significant goal? Would we lose our ambition? Our best students? Or be liberated to do the job the market gives us anyway in a more creative way? Would mastery eclipse the "curve" as our pedagogical politics, as Feinman and Feldman once sugested? Or is "Pass/Fail" just the modern version of the "Gentleman's B" that has always been the privilege of certain schools? Like the ones I attended and certainly expect to send my children!

Grades may not have much relationship with learning, but they have a strong relationship with hard-work. As a result, they provide useful information to employers. I predict that law schools that eliminate this information will find their degrees, on average, slightly less valuable to the students.

Even at a school like Harvard, which will probably not see its students getting lower salaries, I wonder what the impact on the most sought after clerkships will be.

I have experience at two chicago law schools - U of C and Northwestern - that may have some bearing on this.

Although the U of C had a bunch of competitive people who obviously cared about their grades, the competition was very muted. By contrast, the Northwestern students were hyper-competitive, overtly concerned not only about doing well, but about doing better than their peers.

The reason was obvious. Virtually every graduate from Chicago was assured employment at a top (high paying) firm. Northwestern students at the bottom (maybe even middle) of the class didn't have the same options.

(Note that my experience was at a time when Northwestern wasn't quite as highly ranked as it is now, but was still considered a solid school, albeit not one of the top 5 or 10.)

I don't know that I have a firm opinion about this grading thing, but I can share one perspective that I noticed in law school.

Having a grading system like the one at BYU tends to create serious competition until the first round of grading. After that it has a tendency to create hypercompetition among certain groups (below top 30% trying to crack the top 30%, top 20 trying to crack top 10, and so on), but as you move from 1L's to 2L's to 3L's, my impression is that grades largely pigeon-hole people and by the time students are entering their 3L year most students have "succumbed to their fate" and just anticipate that their standing is what it is - the result is that competition and effort actually subsides below a certain percentage of class standing.

Mind you, my evidence is purely anecdotal, but I think there is something to it.

As one student confided to me in his 3L year - "It doesn't matter how hard I try, I just end up around 3.3, so I figure, why bother with all the hard work." My impression from interacting with other students is that he wasn't the only one who developed this perception over time.

I agree with previous posters that while law school grades may not encourage "true learning," they provide employers a generally reliable indicator of a student's likely success as a lawyer.

Grades are not precise indicators and do not consider many qualities that may otherwise carry a student to professional success, but I would say they accurately reflect a student's ambition, intellect, writing ability, and ability to adapt.

While I know and associate with many bright and capable students who are not in the top 20 or 30%, I know very few students in the top 20 or 30% who are not bright and capable. Most students in the top 20% also have generally consistent grades (i.e., they receive a 3.5-4.0 in every class).

I would also say that most people in the very bottom of the class earned those grades by skipping class, failing to complete reading assignments, neglecting finals preparation, and perhaps most fatally, missing the opportunity to improve by meeting with professors and taking advantage of academic counseling programs.

As for the mass of students between the top 30% and the bottom 10%, grades become more arbitrary.

At any rate, I cannot imagine a grading system that would encourage "real education" while not also diminishing competition (or the impetus to diligently read and perform well on class assignments) among students. What professors should be asking is how they can change grading practices to prevent students from "gaming" the system to achieve good results with the least amount of effort. I think mid-term examinations and more writing assignments would be a good move in this direction.

On another note, I would like to see how Harvard, Stanford, and Yale perform in clerkship placement if judges were provided with accurate class rank information. Under the new grading regime, judges will have to engage in a significant amount of guess-work and rely very heavily on faculty recommendations to assess a student's academic aptitude. If more information were provided, the top three schools' monopoly on top clerkships would probably weaken (hence the strong incentive for HYS administrators to maintain the status quo).

I am a student at Brooklyn Law School. Like those from BYU stuents from BLS need top grades to access the "elite" jobs and clerkships. Unfortunately for me I had a Con. Law professor who was unable to put her personal biases aside when grading the exam (that required students to state their opinions of Scalia's interpretive method). This prof graded without any visible standard aside from her idealogical views on the role of the judiciary and prefrence for strict interpretivism. Additionally, the prof ignored my emails and never provided me with any explaination of what I got wrong on the test. Thus, the C I got in her class barred me from any on-campus interviews I would have otherwise been eligible for and continues to adversely affect my employment opportunities.

What would you suggest a student in my situation do? Are there any possible contract claims for completely unfair exams/grading? 40k is an awefully expensive price to pay for inaccurate evaluations of a student's understanding of substantive course material. Schools seem to try so hard to ensure accuracy through blind grading while hiring profs who don't care enough to write and grade a fair test.

I am a student at Brooklyn Law School. Like those from BYU stuents from BLS need top grades to access the "elite" jobs and clerkships. Unfortunately for me I had a Con. Law professor who was unable to put her personal biases aside when grading the exam (that required students to state their opinions of Scalia's interpretive method). This prof graded without any visible standard aside from her idealogical views on the role of the judiciary and prefrence for strict interpretivism. Additionally, the prof ignored my emails and never provided me with any explaination of what I got wrong on the test. Thus, the C I got in her class barred me from any on-campus interviews I would have otherwise been eligible for and continues to adversely affect my employment opportunities.

What would you suggest a student in my situation do? Are there any possible contract claims for completely unfair exams/grading? 40k is an awefully expensive price to pay for inaccurate evaluations of a student's understanding of substantive course material. Schools seem to try so hard to ensure accuracy through blind grading while hiring profs who don't care enough to write and grade a fair test.

Some states did not require graduates of the state law scool to take the bar exam.E.G. tenn. and wv.There are lawyers in those states who may never have openned a law book,Many of these became judges.

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