I took my last exam on December 13, and in the 16 days since, no grades have arrived. Given the rigor of the academic process, you would imagine that the administration would be equally rigorous in rounding up our marks for the semester. This, it turns out, is incorrect.
What I find most frustrating about all this is that I have no empirical measure of how I’ve done. The work, the strain, the extra pounds, may have been just what the doctor ordered, or may have been futile.
For those of you who don’t know, law school is graded on a curve. This means that the grades in every class have to conform to a university mandated average, in our case B/B- for first year classes. While this may seem like just another quirk of law school, it has real consequences. Law school is a strict meritocracy, and money is handed out as a function of class rank. As an added bonus, if you do poorly enough in your first year classes, they give you boot.
And while there are two full pages in the course catalogue that explain how these grades are to be derived (auspices + tea leaves + casting of lots = law review), there is not so much as one jot written about when the grades will fall from the heavens. It’s almost like they are an afterthought, which would be fine if it didn’t have such serious consequences. (Insert grunt of deep frustration here).
So please check back to track my descent into madness. Should be fun.
Join the crowd Doc.
Something tells me we won’t be pulling a Paper Chase moment - folding them up in a paper airplane and casting them into the ocean without reading them.
If they don’t post until they’re all due (1/14) we still have two weeks. Royally sucks…