This is not depicting a touchdown, it’s a depiction of throwing up hands in frustration with this policy.
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
When Notre Dame decided on its amended grading policy for this semester, there was a lot of uncertainty out there. The T14 hadn’t yet fully coalesced around a single standard. The overwhelming majority of law schools hadn’t yet fully followed suit. Employers and judges hadn’t yet started publicly admitting that they weren’t going to use Pass/Fail grades against anyone this semester. The school was in uncharted waters when they decided to offer students an optional Pass/Fail that would apply to the whole semester, but only exercisable before grading.
It’s a bad policy. It exposes law students to undue scrutiny by signaling to employers that anyone who took a Pass this semester must have thought themselves “at risk” of a bad grade which is as bad as just getting a subpar grade, but even worse because it may or may not reflect reality — particularly if the student has excelled in most classes but opted for Pass/Fail because one specific class is being taught by a professor who is struggling with distance learning or something. But in uncertain times, we shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes. The policy sounded good at first blush, but now that everyone’s had a chance to game this idea out and we have input from the wisdom of crowds (and make no mistake, all the other law schools at least considered this policy before thinking through all its repercussions and going with mandatory Pass/Fail) there’s no excuse for clinging to it other than pride.
Which is, Notre Dame should know, one of the seven deadly sins.
But a message to students last night from assistant dean Kevin O’Rear clarified that the institution isn’t going to confront the mountain of evidence piling up around it and will double down on their policy like it was Ptolemaic Geocentrism, baby.
Do only a third of students prefer the mandatory Pass/Fail option? If they did, that was a long time ago. A poll taken this week with 74.53 percent participation (76 percent if you only count JD students) showed a whopping 80 percent oppose the current policy with 58 percent preferring to follow the rest of legal academia to mandatory Pass/Fail and 42 percent preferring the optional Pass/Fail after seeing grades model. The poll doesn’t show how many of that 42 percent would be fine with mandatory Pass/Fail in a pinch but it’s safe to say it’s a decent chunk.
So what were these “underlying considerations” that the school feels they have to stick with?
He’s really leaning on this “the students don’t want it” canard. When you’re getting clowned on argument number 1, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the brief. Did the employers express that preference? Maybe. Have they lately? Probably not. A lot of the thinking about all this has changed over the last couple weeks. “There is no reason to believe that employers will agree… to wait until January to interview”? Um, the economy is in freefall. Employers are laying people off and canceling summer associate programs. They aren’t going to be in a position to know what they need in August. And let’s not overlook that whatever the employers might say, early interviews will happen whenever the top 30 law schools damn well please. A Midwestern regional firm is going to load up on Notre Dame students in September and then hang an “all full” sign when Northwestern and Michigan open up for interviews? Good luck with that. He’ll later say that, without grades, Fall interviews will be difficult to conduct which begs this very question.
Wow. Then he cites the struggling economy and employment market — in direct, glorious contradiction to the considerations he’d just finished making.
And then he concludes by claiming the school has a moral and ethical duty to provide letter grades. Except… they’re letting students optionally take Pass/Fail. So it’s more of a “situational moral and ethical duty,” I suppose.
What a mess of an argument. Honestly, I haven’t seen Notre Dame go down in flames like this since… oh. Too soon.
Four hours after sending this around, O’Rear sent another only slightly less coherent email:
Dear Students: I have received notes from many of you about the grading policy and the message that Dean Cole asked that I share earlier this evening. Based on those notes, it is clear to me that right now, the most helpful thing will be a discussion about ANYTHING OTHER THAN GRADES. Let’s have another story time.
Story time.
And he’s not joking. A two-and-a-half page account of the first law professor at Notre Dame who turned out not to be licensed to practice law — I assume because he’d taken classes Pass/Fail — and the rest of his family who lived in Deadwood. The whole thing is like watching the Chewbacca Defense except this is real life.
Look, the school did what it thought was in the best interests of the students. It turns out that none of their arguments hold water. At some point, part of training lawyers is training them to abandon bad arguments when the evidence starts piling up. In criminal defense, at a certain point the evidence can get so overwhelming that it’s time to change course and start talking deal for the good of the client.
It’s one of those “moral and ethical duties.”
Earlier: Law School Creates Worst Of All Possible Grading Policies For No Good Reason
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.