I observed the other day that there was a growing movement by colleges to stop using the SAT scores as one of their criteria of admission. I now see that Stanford Law School is changing its grading practices, abandoning letters, and substituting “levels of achievement.” One has a sense of deja vu all over again.
For almost four decades, I have been reading transcripts from colleges and universities. I remember years ago observing that Sarah Lawrence College did not use grades but rather faculty wrote short paragraphs describing the work of the students. Once you read 10 transcripts from Sara Lawrence, you discovered that there was an “A” paragraph — “The best student of my professional experience;” and a “B” paragraph — “The best student in 20 years;” and a “C” paragraph — “The finest student in a decade.” The direction is abundantly clear.
Yale Law School, if memory serves me, had in place during my days there a scheme that used the words Honors, High Pass, and Pass in lieu of the letters, A, B, and C. Contemporary “novelty” at Stanford strikes me as old wine in new bottles — back to the future. I’m not sure what outcome is being sought, although I know what’s alleged. The idea is to reduce the pressure on students and to make the environment more hospitable to learning and less to competition for its own sake.
But that seems to me to be a futile enterprise when one collects under the tent young people as dauntingly aggressive and ambitious as those found at such places as Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Michigan, and Brooklyn Law Schools. For the students, the stakes appear so high: law review, clerkships for distinguished judges; and jobs immediately following graduation that pay salaries that exceed those of the faculty who were recently their teachers. It is going to take more than fiddling with the A-B-C’s to transform the environment that has been created over decades. Elite law schools can’t reinvent their culture by simple cosmetics.
Students worked relentlessly throughout their college years in order to get admitted to these fine schools — achieving top grades, taking on meaningful and challenging summer experiences, earning the respect of their professors to gain excellent letters of recommendation (“The best student of my professional experience”). It is difficult, if not impossible, to turn off the spigot simply because of the changes in nomenclature. Students know that to succeed in the workplaces they will soon find themselves in they will need some sort of competitive edge: utilizing all the academic smarts they have developed; honing their street-savvy ways; allowing their winning personalities to shine forth; and keeping alert for the opportunity to distinguish oneself through deeds and assignments. Students whose transcripts read “present” will find life particularly challenging after commencement.
