Academic

On Grades, Sorting, and Sucking Up

By Ann Bartow

Brian Leiter has another post about grading changes at several top law schools, noting: “There are rumors aplenty that Columbia and NYU may move to something like the Yale system of essentially two grades–Honors/Pass–now that Harvard and Stanford are going that route (though perhaps these two will actually utilize Low Pass and Fail, unlike Yale).” His post further reports:

A law professor at a top school writes:

I think the last point in your post about eliminating grades was right on.  At least when I was there, the grading system at Yale did not really lessen the sense of competitiveness, at least for those whose ambitions were higher than landing a job at a top firm.  It simply displaced the competition towards sucking up to the professors whom students perceived to be able to deliver the goods (esp. clerkships).  For those of us who wanted to clerk but did not really want to participate in that game, the lack of grades was actually fairly frustrating.  I also think there are some pernicious distributive consequences to the sucking-up system, since (although my only evidence for this is anecdotal) I think minority students tend to be particularly reluctant to engage in it.

“Reluctance” to engage in sucking up is only part of the problem certain students are going to have.  My guess is that “class” barriers are also going to be an issue.  Minority students with affluent backgrounds may be at a disadvantage, but still have an easier time figuring out how to make a strong positive impression on a law professor than students of any color from economically challenged backgrounds, with minority students from poor families especially at risk.

And there is another big barrier to non-grade related sucking up based success, and that is linked to gender, sex appeal and sexual orientation.  One example: It can be difficult and complicated for a heterosexual female student to pay a lot of positive sucking up style attention to a male professor without it seeming like romantic interest.  What the male professor does about this can vary dramatically, shall I say with great restraint and circumspection.  But this issue arises even when a law school has a traditional grading system, every law prof reading this knows that. And this phenomenon occurs with heterosexual male students too, and with lesbian and gay students as well, where the possibility of a homophobic reaction by a faculty member enters the already potent mix. Changing a grading system to substantially exacerbate the importance of sucking up is going to increase the potential for misunderstanding and misbehavior between faculty members and students, and my guess is the negative aspects of all this will fall hardest on women students, if for no other reason than numbers: there are significantly more male law professors than female law professors at almost every law school in the nation.

–Ann Bartow

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on October 29, 2008 (boomark / email).