Law in Contemporary Society
          Days after we finished our finals we received the following email from the Dean of our law school which I am reposting here:

Congratulations on finishing your exams. I wanted to write to you about an issue that is important to all of us: the timely submission of grades. I know that not having timely grades can complicate job searches and can impact students in other ways as well. So I wanted to let you know that the faculty and I have been focusing on this issue, and that we voted last Friday to set a hard deadline for grading exams and to impose penalties on faculty who do not meet these deadline. Essentially, starting next academic year, grades will be due on the Friday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (the Friday before the start of classes) for the fall semester, and on June 15th for the spring semester (except, of course, for graduating students, whose grades are due before graduation). Those few members of the faculty who have a combined total of more than 150 exams to grade will have an extra week. Faculty who do not comply will be included on a list circulated to the faculty and students, and they will also be fined. I realize that there will still be some situations when, for extenuating circumstances, grades will be late, but my hope is those situations will be rare. We realize that the issue is important to you, and we are committed to addressing it. I want to thank those of you who have raised the issue with me. Your suggestions are important to us.

Best,

DS

          I am not sure how the rest of you reacted but aside from some choice GSF emails we received throughout the year, this had to be one of the most ridiculous law school communications I have read thus far. Choice parts that I reacted to include the hard reasons that the Dean gives for exactly why timely submission of grades are so important. He writes that it can "complicate the job search" and gives the highly illuminating explanation that it "can impact students in other ways as well." Oh well that explains it. It is important because of the things that it does to the people. Right.

          Now, I know I have friends who were certainly frustrated by late grades last semester, but can anyone explain to me how exactly this impacts us as students? To me, I think it is a blessing. Employers actually have to interview you and speak to you, speak to your references and maybe even read writing samples to evaluate you as a candidate. The only complication seems to be that employers have to open the cans and taste the meat instead of just reading the label- maybe the Dean can send them can openers instead of circulating lists that to me seem to be nothing more than a form of bullying. I am pretty disgusted by any form of public shaming as a coercive measure and the list of faculty who don't submit grades seems to be just that. And then fines? The Dean has so little control over the faculty that he de facto leads that he has to dock their pay?

          Maybe there are students to whom this issue is important and if so, I would love to hear the reasons why, but to me this is little more than a foolish email that has much potential for Above the Law lampooning and on a more serious note threatens the kind of evaluative feedback that classes like this provide. If there are students who feel the same way and want to explain to the Dean why we need more feedback instead of just faster grading of exams, we should get together and formulate a way to present our thoughts to the Dean.

-- ElviraKras - 23 May 2012

Hi Elvira,

Thanks for posting this - i completely agree and would definitely be interested in getting together and looking at ways of trying to make a change on this. One of my personal goals this summer, inspired by Eben's initially confronting teaching style (which was unlike any i've ever experienced, both professionally and in a family of teachers), is to start to get my head around some of the adult/tertiary education literature in order to see how current best practices in tertiary, graduate school, and professional school teaching in particular differ from those in pre-k, primary and secondary education. My next step after that is to begin researching and compiling a list of innovative law school teaching models from around the world, in order to determine if any themes can be discerned and applied to our environment. Finally, I'd like to set up some time to talk with some professors in the law school - preferably those with an interest in innovative teaching methods - about their suggestions for reform. If you'd be interested collaborating on any or all of these ventures, please let me know. Also, some others in addition to myself have expressed interest in the related topic of curricular reform on the Duncan Kennedy thread (Skyler, Abiola, Meagan, Angeline, Jared and Alex if i have read it correctly), so if you do began to move forward on this it might be worth combining the two threads and people for greater impact.

-- RohanGrey - 23 May 2012

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r2 - 23 May 2012 - 22:23:38 - RohanGrey
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