Trend Toward Eliminating Grading At Law School

It looks like there is an emerging trend of law schools eliminating grades in preference for pass-fail systems. It started with Yale and Stanford, but Harvard has now announced the same policy. Of course, it is easier for the elite schools to do this than for lower ranked schools, since any passing student at Harvard Law School is likely to be at least pretty good ;-) but it will be interesting to see if second or third rung schools can move in the same direction, or if they are even interested in doing so. They certainly have different incentives, so they may not see pass-fail systems as advancing their interests. Interesting discussion is already developing on Brian Leiter’s blog and on Ann Bartow’s blog.

For my own part, I like pass-fail grading systems and think they could work well in law schools in Canada. They encourage students to spend energy on other activities and not to scrounge for every possible grade in classes. But, of course, it won’t happen: the job market in law is supersaturated and it is in the firm’s interest to maintain a grading system that clearly ranks students. Even if the law schools wanted to move to such a system, they would have no leverage to do so now.

It’s worth noting that medical schools are typically pass-fail, the attitude being that the threshold is gaining admission, and anybody who can get in to medical school and get through it must be good enough. But in Canada at least there is a labour shortage in the medical profession, so everybody gets a job no matter what their grades would have been. No doubt it also makes a difference that there is no private market for medical residents the way there is for articling students and clerks.