Giving reasons for grades would help improve the student experience
I often joke that my law school grades are none of my business and have nothing to do with me. Coping mechanism aside, there’s some truth to this.
After all, we attend classes, do readings (sometimes), and take notes for four months, and then pour that into an exam or paper in a stress-induced trance, cross our fingers and wait. A month or so later, we are awarded a strange letter label, and nothing else.
Those letters, representing where you fell on a curve of students relative to the class, don’t tell you much about the quality of your exam or paper or where you went wrong. In short, they won’t actually help you learn. Without receiving actual feedback, even if students have the option of approaching their professors directly, student learning is inevitably falling through the gaps.
This isn’t a U of T Law-specific issue, but instead, a long-standing norm of legal pedagogy. 100 percent finals with little to no offered feedback, either after the exam or throughout the semester has long been identified as an issue that law schools ought to work to change for the sake of their students as noted by Daniel Schwarcz and Dion Farganis in the Journal of Legal Education.
In law school, at least theoretically, we’re supposed to be learning, not just the law, but wider skills that help us “think like lawyers.” Most of our classes, even if they are built around different topics, revolve around common skills that we could improve upon when given specific individualized feedback.
Studies have shown that individual feedback does, in fact, have a meaningful impact on student success. I can say that the clinics and moots where I have received direct feedback, instead of a grade, were more valuable learning experiences than any class. Schwarcz and Farganis found that students given feedback performed better in all their courses. Forcing students to critically analyze their own skills, instead of simply telling them where they placed on a curve, promotes their acquisition of legal skills, beyond “teaching to the test.” It helps students learn to communicate clearly in writing, recognize legal issues, synthesize applicable legal precedent, and develop persuasive policy arguments.
While the Faculty, to their credit, have begun increasing tiered assignments in the first year, and have placed some emphasis on providing feedback in 1L students’ small group class and Legal Research and Writing, there seems to be the understanding that after first year, law students are primarily on their own, and individual feedback is not the norm, but an appreciated exception. Although law school is a three-year endeavour, the attitude appears to be that after the first year, students are done acquiring legal skills and are now simply waiting to meet the bar requirements. While I’ll admit that this is a controversial take, upper-year students should also be learning. Promoting a cultural shift towards reasons for grades would help promote this.
Giving reasons for grades would also be beneficial to student mental health. Studies have shown, unsurprisingly, that law students have higher rates of anxiety and depression than the general population. One possible cause is our grading system. When grades rest entirely on a single final curved against classmates, this diminishes students’ sense of academic self-efficacy and the sense that they have the ability to exert control over outcomes. Academic self-efficacy is important to a student’s ability to master new concepts and guard against the mental health problems that disproportionately plague law students. In Kathryne M. Young’s article with the Fordham Law Review, students surveyed across 36 law schools consistently mentioned that relying on curved assessments makes them feel that it never matters how well they know the material in any absolute sense, but only how well they know it compared to their peers. As we know, nothing good comes from comparing yourself to others. Giving students reasons for grades would promote the sense that grades aren’t arbitrary, but actually based on factors they have control over.
Yes, we do have the ability to get feedback once we ask for it, but this places the burden on students to approach a professor, which is nerve-wracking. It’s also not unheard of for professors to overlook requests or refuse them outright. I appreciate that as law students, we are expected to advocate for ourselves, but this can become exhausting. Furthermore, as our Governing Council Academic Appeals Committee recognized in 2020, procedures that put the onus on students to request help disproportionately impact students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. As the law school claims that they are working for a “culture of compassion,” no longer forcing students to fight for feedback seems like a simple first step.
I’m sensitive to the fact that this would create work for professors. However, we could assume that most professors are already following a rubric or standardized scale and are thus likely already giving reasons for grades, but students are not being provided with them. This would, if nothing else, promote a more thoughtful, standard approach to grading. Reasons for grades would also not need to be provided alongside the initial grade release on a student’s transcript, but afterward, alleviating the burden on our long-suffering Records Office. At more than $33,000 a year, it’s hard to argue that we haven’t earned some kind of feedback from our professors.
I appreciate that not every student is going to want explanations and that this would increase the workload on professors and administration, but the current standard promotes a sense of opacity and arbitrariness about grades that not only negatively impacts student health, but feeds into the idea that law school is simply a three-year waiting period for a career, rather than an institution of higher education. We like to claim that we’re a leading academic institution. Shouldn’t we be doing what we can to help students learn?
Legal Journalism: P (No reasons given, or in this case, needed)
