Fight The Hypo

So, our grades are trickling in… finally. Still waiting on two, though.

I’m still a bit miffed that I had to pay for my second semester of law school before knowing how I did in the first semester, but I guess I’ll just have to get over it.

Needless to say, I’ve had several discussions with people about how significant first-semester law school grades really are. Frankly, I’ve never put much stock in grades so long as mine were As or Bs. I did what I thought was the minimum I could do to get by and tried not to exert myself too much. Consequently, I mostly coasted through (i.e. squandered) undergrad and was fortunate enough to get by with decent grades. I don’t share that to toot my own horn. Quite the contrary - it was a terrible way to do it and I deeply regret the time and money I wasted doing it that way.

So, this whole “grades are everything” mentality is quite new to me - a) because I’ve never studied as hard as I have for law school classes and b) I’ve never before felt as though I was competing against my classmates. Grades were just what they were. Law school is different, so I’m told. Everything’s graded on a curve, so everything is “competing against your classmates.” I understand the concept; I don’t really like it.

When I try to detach from the whole thing, therefore, it’s difficult to get a good perspective. So, I’ve turned to some trusted sources (and some have turned to me) and here’s what I’ve learned and heard…One rather successful and (in my opinion) rather intelligent attorney told me:

C’s are [fine], everything else is gravy. I don’t know any people from class from top to bottom who are not working in what they want to do. Law opens lots of doors. the first year is the hardest. Just keep telling yourself it is like being hazed into a fraternity -”thank you sir may I have another.” It is a marathon, not a sprint. The goal is to be alive at the end.

I suppose I largely agree with that - though the prospect of having a C stare back at me is a bit disconcerting. Still that sentiment is at least tacitly reinforced by this blog post by Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy. He writes, in part:

With that said, fall 1L exam grades are less important than most people think. This is true for a couple of reasons. First, lots of people find that their first-semester grades are pretty different from their later semester grades. It takes some students more time than others to get “the game” of how to answer a law school exam question, and when they do their grades go way up. Second, your law school GPA is much less important — and in many cases, completely irrelevant — after your first job. Once you’re out of school for a bit, people care whether you are a good attorney, not your law school GPA. Third, the fact that a) judges are hiring clerks later, and b) law review at most schools is becoming less grade-based and more write-on based is tending to make 1L fall grades less important than they used to be. If law review at your school is based on a write-on competition, your grades don’t matter for it; and if judges are hiring clerks based on more than their 1L grades, your 1L grades are comparatively less important than they used to be.

Finally, it’s important not to let lower-than-expected grades become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Recognize the psychological game going on here: many students expect their fall 1L grades to give them a lightning bolt of insight about their future in the legal profession. Grades don’t do that, though: all they can do is measure how well you did relative to your classmates on a few 3-hour exams taken at a particular place at a particular time. Too many students think that grades are destiny, and begin to take steps to readjust their expectations to what they think is their destiny. Some students react to the sting of lower-than-expected grades by tuning out, by deciding law is dumb, and by concluding that they just aren’t good at it. The problem is that it’s just this kind of attitude that makes it less likely your grades will improve; by tuning out, you’ll only make it more likely that you won’t do as well as you should next time. My advice is to stick with it: get your old exams back, review them, and make sure you know what you did wrong. Then have faith in yourself and your smarts that you can improve your grades in the spring.

The whole “the further away you get, the less important they become” argument is important to remember, I’m sure. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to provide any sense that I can actually get that first job (not to mention how I do it). Which is why I appreciate Professor Kerr’s discussion of how grades are becoming less important and, critically, how you can’t let lower-than-hoped-for grades destroy what will otherwise be a fantastic law school experience.Lastly, I found this nugget from a law school blog written a few years ago:

You are just as smart as you were the day before you got your grades. And now you know something you didn’t know before: what to expect from law school exams. March your butt into your professors’ offices and sit down with the exam and talk to them about it. We all know you studied your head off, but did you articulate what you knew, or did you study the wrong stuff, or did you have trouble identifying the issues, or were you a disorganized mess, or did you confuse the terminology, or what? Whichever one(s) it was, you’re going to fix it next semester. The professor will help you, if you ask. And now you know to ask.