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Grading Harvard Law School
From the school that brought the term "grade inflation" to the public consciousness comes this new grading system for law students--or rather, non-grading system. According to an article in the Harvard Crimson, starting in the Fall 2009 semester the Harvard Law School will no longer assign letter grades, replacing them with the more vague designations of "Honors," "Pass," "Low Pass" and "Fail." Similar grading systems are already in place at the Stanford and Yale law schools.
As expected, this new grading scale has come under substantial criticism from a number of quarters. Several faculty members--and quite a few students as well--have expressed concern that the new system will blur the distinctions among students in terms of academic achievement. This presents more of a problem for Harvard than for Stanford or Yale, as Harvard enrolls significantly more students. The result will likely be a large cohort of graduates with very similar transcripts, which give very few objective indicators of aptitude for employers to evaluate.
This is precisely what ACTA has been arguing in our writings on grade inflation and relaxed standards--namely, that it harms students by depriving them of a realistic assessment of their academic performance, and leaves future employers unable to distinguish the excellent from the merely "good enough."
This is yet one more example of Harvard following a trend, rather than setting a standard. For this, Harvard deserves an F.
Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on September 30, 2008 at September 30, 2008 02:56 PM
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