Word: judgment
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Under the current system, year-end examinations assert the definitive judgment of our capacities while providing us no evaluative feedback during the year. Grades create a status hierarchy with few winners, but many losers. The current procedures are unjustifiable at a time when the school is attracting so many highly-motivated, well-qualified students. As the ones who stand to lose by this system, we want to see it changed before we experience the unhappy effects of it; but we also recognize that the issues we raise deeply affect an educational process that is the central concern of a faculty...
Final exams ignore the evaluation of the student's ability to research a problem and analyze it under non-exam conditions, his ability to exercise sound judgment in considering problems of social policy, his ability to communicate and reason orally, and his ability to work with other people. All of these are skills central to a lawyer's career. Moreover, this pressure-cooker form of evaluation is very unlike that which occurs after graduation. That evaluation--whether in a law firm, government, or teaching--takes place over time and is based on cumulative efforts...
...basis for making hiring decisions. They are not the only criterion now used, nor are they a foolproof means for stopping those determined to discriminate. And the current use of grades with respect to employment carries three problems. First, the heavy reliance on first-year grades constitutes a premature judgment of abilities. Second, and consequently, there is little premium on development over the three years of law school. This is especially true when much hiring for second-year summer jobs is done before Christmas and those jobs often lead to permanent employment after graduation. Third, examinations simply do not provide...
...submit that grades fulfill their functions very imperfectly. For too many people they tend to produce confusion and unnecessary competitiveness and, for some, a disdain for their years at Harvard Law School. First-year grades become the definitive judgment of a student's work. They open or close the doors of the honoraries. They enhance or hinder chances for jobs. They establish academic and social hierarchies which reign over the following two years and beyond. Thus, grades become fixed in the minds of many as the most important part of their law school careers. This is an unfortunate and unintended...
Finally, consistent feedback would remove a student's nagging doubts about how well he was doing, and allow him to devote more energy to learning legal skills. Evaluation would no longer serve as a punishing judgment which offers no help in the first year and discourages work thereafter...