Law Students

Where, O Where Are My %$$#(& Grades?

By Casebook Sherpa

The Great Waiting continues. Much weeping and gnashing of teeth accompanies each visit to Cardinal Station, our school’s site for students to pay bills, register, and receive grades. 23 days since our last exam and 29 since our first, there still no grades.

The only grade I have so far is from Lawyering Skills and that class ended in April with our Appellate Brief. Dr. Bombay wondered last week whether other schools run on similar timelines. So, do you? Are you still waiting for Spring semester grades? When you were in school did you wait long? Did you even care how long it took to get grades back? Were you ever prevented from getting a job or internship by delays in receiving grades? Did you a miss a deadline to transfer because of your school’s grading deadline?

So, I’m still waiting on Property, Contracts, and Torts (the other Torts section received their grades). I’m told the deadline for professors to turn grades in is June 9th, a full month after the exam period ended. Even then, a friend says the Registrar’s office tells him that professors don’t really pay attention to the deadline, opting to just turn grades in when they get to it. The school’s website says that average first year class size 70. The entering evening division class is half the size of the day division class so I would imagine evening classes students that number is lower - my largest class was 46 (ish). So if we assume evening sections average 50 students (on the most extreme high end), a professor could review 3.5 exams per business day and be done with exams and grades in three weeks.

Frustration. I really want to say sincerely that I understand my professors’ predicament - they have demands on their time, they’d like a break, it’s a long semester, they have families, etc. While that’s all true, students wait for grades for jobs, transferring, and simply to have some sort of measure of how they actually did. It’s not like we’re Hart from The Paper Chase hanging out at the beach just waiting to tear up our grades because of some epiphany that they don’t matter. Aside from being a disappointing end to an otherwise great movie, we actually do obsess about such things and many of us actually do need them in a timely fashion.

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Full post as published by Fight The Hypo on May 28, 2008 (boomark / email).