Armed With an Edley Weapon
posted by Armen Adzhemyan at 11:52 AM
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
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47 Comments:
Well, it's nice to see Dean Edley getting positive national coverage. If the reporter had included a sentence about our Registrar fiascos and inefficient IT, imagine the change that might have happened at Boalt. It's great that Dean Edley wants to create institutes for X, Y, and Z, but how about an Institute for a Better Run Boalt?
Word is that, if you ask the Registrar's office, grades won't be posted until February.
That's right, February!
So, after raising our expectations several months ago about grade reporting and promising that we won't have to wait until February, the Registrar now seems to be lowering those expectations to a level of sub-P performance. Either Jones screwed up or UC Berkeley betrayed Jones and went back on the deal to let Boalt post its grades much earlier. Either way, something ridiculously inefficient and incompetent occured.
I think faculty and their assistants should pick up the slack in the meantime.
Professors, across the board, should email students once they have completed assigning grades. Professors should tell students that they can email their assistants for their grades and raw scores. Even if the class has 90 people in it, the average response rate will likely be no more than 60% (requests may be higher from 1L classes than 2L/3L classes, predictably). It shouldn't take a diligent assistant more than 1 hour a day for two days to get back to each student who requests (I'm assuming, generously, that it takes 2 minutes for the assistant to look up each grade, cut-and-paste, and hit reply back to the student with the barebones information).
Even if the time that Boalt faculty and staff spend on emailing grades adds up cumulatively, the school earns student services points in the eyes of its students. And distributing the responsibility of grade-reporting on professors, at least in the short-term, also reminds the faculty that the current Student Services/Registrar/UCB/IT apparatus is not meeting expectations that are ingrained in Boalt's private school tuition rates. Faculty committees should then focus on making this apparatus more efficient.
Remember, back in the day, professors used to report grades to students after classes through a variety of time-tested means. They would publicly post grades outside their offices, and you'd look yours up by Exam ID. If we all guard our Exam ID, which isn't very hard to do, that system is relatively anonymous. Also, back in the day, at least at other schools, you could include a self-addressed, stamped post-card with your exam materials at exam time. After grading exams anonymously, the professors would then be permitted access to these postcards and could send out grades via snail mail.
Now, we have email, which is more private and efficient than either of the methods of yesteryear. Let's take advantage of it.
Good article. I like Dean Edley and the way he does things around here. He's not highly visible to us the students, but he's available if you need him.
Moreoever, I agree with the tone he sets. I find his style pragmatic, reasonable, and approachable.
Trivia: did you know that Edley is mentioned in Scott Turow's "1L"? He is mentioned (circa. 1971) as the first black student in many years to make Harvard Law Review.
3:34--it's really Dean Ortiz's job to do that stuff. Dean Edley cannot wash his hands of ground-level problems, but between you and me, I'd rather have him raising the school's profile and generating donations than placating our gripes. If you think your plan is a good one, print it out, sign your name to it, and submit it to Dean Ortiz.
good pun with the title of the post. :)
i'm really glad that he's raising our national profile. still, if you check out the wsj law blog entry about this, you'll see that there are some alum who are actually annoyed by some of the stuff he's doing.
I think 3:34 had it exactly right: the Registrar should just ask the Professors/Assistants to make a simple spreadsheet with grades and exam numbers, and then give em to the Registrar to post up in the hallway (like the good old days). Even individual emails arent necessary.
This has the advantage of being fast, easy, and a good way to pacify whomever is pissed off about this. And if its anonymous enough for the professors, its anonymous enough for us students.
Moreover, quick action by the Registrar and related IT incompetants would save them from further bad press in the blogosphere (though I doubt they care). But if much of the current round of administration-bashing has evolved out of the grade problem, they'd be smart to satisfy the slavering masses wit' a quickness.
Dear Registrar: just put it on paper, put it in the hallway, and put it behind you.
I'm so sick of people bitching about grades. WHO FREAKIN' CARES WHETHER WE GET THEM THIS WEEK OR TWO WEEKS FROM NOW? In what way will it impact the quality of your life or legal education? How relevant is it to your future? JEEEZ.
And one more thing: you're going to a top 10 law school. You're among the most privileged people on God's green earth. Quit bitching about grades, of all things!
Okay, ranting aside, I like this article. It's a fairly narrow introduction to D.E., but it's good to see him/Boalt getting publicity.
Do you think that all Boalt Alums that read the WSJ Law blog and post on it are Tools like the ones who posted on that thread?
Wow. I mean wow.
Boalt should get the grades to students within a day or so after professors have submitted them, as promised. Kelleher-Jones and Student Services promised this in the fall. That promise is memorialized in an email and then in the Fall Exam Memo.
And now Boalt has broken that promise.
Boalt should remedy the breach by finding an alternate means to fulfill the promise. Blaming the "programmers" or central UCB is no excuse when other means of promulgating grades are quite available to the Registrar, Student Services, and Faculty. 3:34 PM, supported by 9:37 PM, have persuasively listed other means by which Boalt can convey grades. The administration and faculty should choose one of those means and act on them immediately.
A promise is a promise. Several months ago, the Registrar didn't have to promise to give us grades within a day or two of faculty uploading. But she did make that promise. By making that promise, the administration benefited from a marginal increase in goodwill from students in their dealings with the Registrar and Student Services. That goodwill, however, was totally unearned.
If Boalt's administration wants to generate advanced goodwill in the future by making promises of better student services, then they should fulfill this promise now. Or else their promises will be meaningless.
je ne sais rien, I'm sympathetic to your points. I've never really understood the grades obsession. But this isn't about grade obsession (it kinda is). By New Years Day, UCLA undergrads had their grades. Do you think we'd be obsessing this much if Boalt had that kind of speed and efficiency? A lot of the comments are about grades, but speaking for myself, my displeasure with this school is with the technological inadequecies in general. I will list them off just for good measure:
1. No centralized website/student info system.
2. It took the EIC of CLR to create a meaningful online enrollment count.
3. B-Space sucks.
4. Why are wasting money on running the AC in Booth when it's 55 degrees outside?
5. Wireless in the library blows.
And these are just things that are still problems. When Boalt wasn't a top 10 school we didn't even have wireless or electricity in the classrooms. Now even Booth is wired. None of these changes would have occurred if we had been happy with our cushy legal education, sat back played solitaire, and watched the grades roll in during March Madness.
Also, I don't understand why people throw out privileged when talking about law students. Privileged how? At job prospects? Loans? Screw you, I worked my ass off to get here, my parents aren't lawyers, and hell yes I'm going to bitch about a shitty infrastructure.
Excellent points, Armen, excellent points!
I'd add a 6th - why is the "state of the art" media/seminar room (145) hot as hell with no AC or air to speak of? Shut the door in that room and a teacher risks suffocating students. Take some of the AC in Booth and redirect it to 145.
According to a woman I spoke with in the Registrar's Office, part of the problem is that Boalt decided to switch over to the new system at the last minute and all the kinks weren't worked out in the program.
10:44: It's nice that you don't worry about grades, but some of us do (rationally or irrationally) and as such not having them is a source of anxiety. Further, for those of us 2Ls and 3Ls starting to look into clerkships, it's important to know our grades so we can estimate which courts we're competitive for. Plus, I'll bet the 1Ls are anxious to know whether they need to revise their study strategies.
I think that my biggest problem with the whole affair is that Boalt admin got our hopes up, so to speak, in the first place. If they'd just kept their mouths shut, no one would have started thinking about grades until the end of this month, at earliest. But the registrar started spouting out that we would have grades super early, and a couple professors even had their grades posted, and Boalties started working ourselves into a tizzy. The registrar set the expectation and got the anxiety going. Additionally, how many emails are really necessary with the subject line "Your Fall Grades"? I think it all just fans the fire.
As earlier posters have pointed out, grades came out during the second weekend back from school in January two years ago. Even under the old system, we didn't have to wait until February.
Can somebody please send Talley a dozen roses for this message?
"As you are undoubtedly aware, the University's e-grade system has been down. Grades for Corps 1 are complete, but the system glitch has affected faculty as well, preventing them from entering final grades. When the site is back up and running, I'll input the grades ASAP. Meantime, PLEASE DO NOT approach me to review your exam before the grades are final."
Why should Talley be applauded for refusing to tell students their grades despite the fact that they're complete?
Umm because it tells the crazed frothing at the mouth grade enthusiasts what the problem is and WHY he can't tell you your grades. You may return to your regularly scheduled crazed frothing at the mouth.
Armen: why do you feel the need to attack people for desiring to know their grades? Just because their values and priorities may be different from yours isn't cause for criticism. Plus, Talley did not indicate in his email that there's a reason why he can't tell students their grades; it merely tells them why he can't upload them onto the system. To the contrary, he explicitly states: "Grades for Corps 1 are complete.."
Armen, can you comment on this?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/18/BAGCONKNGF1.DTL&hw=boalt&sn=001&sc=1000
gunner central.
1L's think of yourself and the work you put in last semester. Are you happy with your performance? Evaluate yourself now before grades come out and warp your mind.
If you get straight P's, you're still smarter and harder working than 99 percent of the planet. If you got straight double HH's, you are still only smarter and harder working than 99 percent of the planet.
Some of you worked a little bit harder than others -- on academics. Some of you will be naturally gifted at writing law school exams. Congrats. Celebrate.
Some of you will have straight P's, you will still be able to make a $145,000 after you graduate if that is your hearts desire.
Honestly, in a lot of cases you will be surprised by who rocks the good grades. Somehow that idiot who opened their mouth and said the dumbest stuff all semester can write a law school exam like nobody's business.
Use this time to take stock of how you feel about your law school experience. It's your time. It's your life.
In a few days three professors who spent as little time as possible grading your exam, will tell you who you are forever and forever and forever.
No man.
You're sitting on top of the world here at Boalt Hall. Enjoy the view.
Amen, 2:00pm. People need to stop being such freakshows about grades. Yes, they're important, but can we stop bitching about it every second of every day?
We've had to time to assess all of that. Personally, I don't care what my grades are, but I've had potential employers ask for them. My concern is not with my ability to get a job when I graduate, but with my ability to get certain jobs this summer.
Like I said, I really don't care, but I need to know. I think it's embarassing to go to one of the best law schools in the nation and still not have grades because of a "programming glitch."
UCB must have utter incompetents or lazy people doing its programming. eGrades should not be down for 5 days and counting. UCB should have drafted a battalion of crackshot programmers to fix the problem in a 24 hour period, paid them the necessary overtime, and locked them in a room until they solved a likely simple problem.
There's too vast a disconnect between the quality of UCB's students and the officers and staff who service them. Our Comp Sci grad department is strong; our law school is strong, and we've got plenty of brilliant former CS programmers in our classes. UCB's programmers and registrar bureuacrats don't need to have grad degrees in CS, but they do need to be able to repair these systems much faster.
And, as Armen has pointed out, these systems need to be decentralized; the law school should declare its IT independence from the crappiness of central UCB. I was walking around Haas Business School a few days ago. That's a nice looking place with seemingly state-of-the-art equipment and facilities. I somehow doubt Haas's registrar would put up with UCB's kicking their students around. That's not the business school way. The culture of student services at Boalt should move toward that of Haas.
I agree with earlier posters that faculty aren't off the hook from reporting grades to students because of UCB's programming glitches. If the faculty have the grades, they should report them to students using email or other means, particularly because the school promised grades would be released 1-2 days after the faculty finish them.
It's obvious that the problem here is the quality of UCB staff. The obstacles are hardly technological.
Alright the data is not perfect, but it looks like peer schools are similarly situated.
And ummm yeaaaaaaaaaaah, the faculty have an obligation to throw a dinner party to announce our grades, with bottles of Moet to the Amjur and Prosser. Did I miss anything? Red carpet reception maybe? An overnight fedex during Christmas giving you your feedbacks on the exam?
There's ABSOLUTELY NO plausible reason to want your grades informally from the faculty other than an unhealthy "need to know." THAT'S IT! Think about that for a second. You want people to go out of their way just to satisfy your curiousity. You might as well require people to hook up in the library just to make it easier to gossip about it. Really now, what are you going to do? Forward your professor's e-mails to MoFo? Ugh.
The AmJur party sounds nice.
Armen,
I think one of the factors that makes people so frustrated with the endless excuses as to why grades cannot be uploaded to the system in a timely manner is the double standard regarding deadlines at the Registrar's office. If they fail to get something done, they can claim any number of excuses for the shortcoming and we must accept whatever bullshit they are feedings us. The same, however, does not apply to situations in which we miss the Registrar's deadlines, for any reason. I've observed numerous situations where the Registrar was completely unyielding with regard to deadlines, even if missed for completely legitimate and justifiable reasons. In the one personal experience I had with this, I had gotten the go-ahead from D. Ortiz to apply late, but when I arrived at the Registrar's office, I got nothing but insults (literally!) and eye rolls about why I couldn't have done this earlier. I realize that they have an office to run and the efficiency of that process depends largely on people's ability to meet deadlines, but they must recognize that students too have exceptional circumstances and if they expect us to be so sympathetic to theirs, perhaps they could stop rolling their eyes every time a student needs to file a form a couple of hours late.
6:22, point well taken. Like I said, it's fair to criticize the inadequacies at this school (IT, staff???, etc.). But I just don't see the need to clamor for grades via skywriting.
Edley: One foot out the door?
Getting his face in the national press:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/education/17face.html?em&ex=1169269200&en=f396b850e0cb1ec7&ei=5087%0A
Making pitches for Obama:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/01/17/with_1st_step_obama_shakes_up_2008_race/
Telling the UC Regents that he is considering leaving (“hemorrhaging of talent beginning with the dean.”):
http://pub.ucsf.edu/today/cache/news/200701171.html
Allow me to be the first to say so: PLEASE don't leave us Dean Edley. You're doing an amazing job. Please see the task you've begun to its conclusion.
Edley's out as soon as someone in Washington asks him to come back. It was true if Kerry had won in '04, and it's true in '08. 1 and 2Ls, hope either Edley raises a lot of money now, or the Republicans win the '08 election. Take your pick.
Edley can go. It's okay. The verdict's not out on whether he's a great fundraiser for Boalt. At heart, he seems to be a policy wonk/public intellectual. I'm sure Boalt has some faculty who are ready to fill his shoes as dean, aggressively fundraise, connect even better with alums in private industry, and bring Boalt to next stage.
Edley's administration has certainly alienated me, so I won't be too upset if he heads back to Washington. He's too political. I thought I was a moderate before I came to Boalt, but his administration makes me feel like an arch right wing fascist. I'll be the first to acknowledge that I personally don't really matter, but from a future fundraising standpoint, alienating students isn't a good idea. Of course I'm totally wrong if further left politics encourage donations from further left alumni that offset people like me, but my gut-feeling hypothesis is that the richest alumni will be those who work in private law firms for a long time, who will tend to be closer to the center. A commenter on the WSJ blog made the observation that every week he gets mail from Boalt seeking donations for political projects that he doesn't support, so I know I'm at least not entirely alone.
Edley's certainly got some sneaky tactics. By blackmailing the Regents into hiking up tuition he's pushing more and more Boalties away from their dreams of a career in public interest and forcing them to take BIGLAW, where they'll be in a better position to write fat donation checks.
Edley's correct that Boalt needs more money NOW, not just in the long-run. Whether that money comes from an increase in student fees or a direct infusion from the state government is another matter. He can't continue to recruit and retain top-notch faculty, most likely, with the current resources. The long-term solution is a serious endowment from private sources. The shot-term palliative measure is to raise those student fees (or have the Regents find a more "creative" way of getting the money).
Look, we've crossed the Rubicon in terms of making law school more "affordable." An extra $10,000 in loans or so won't make a major marginal difference in a lower-middle class or poor individual's decision whether to come to Boalt. And, if it does, then that's the cost of excellence. I have absolutely no problem with that. Gone are the days when law school could cost under $1000 because of state subsidies. The structure of California politics - and politics throughout the country - has changed dramatically, such that state funds are not available to sustain a truly excellent law school. See Virginia, Michigan, et al. Edley has created an LRAP program, so those who truly want to do public interest jobs can do so, despite our near market-rate tuition.
I, like many of you, am invested in Boalt's continued prestige and strength as one of the nation's top law schools. Staying excellent, both in the short-term and long-term, is of paramount concern. So, after the Regents make a more than good-faith effort to see whether the necessary funds can be procured from other sources, I am in favor of a fee hike for the continued excellence of Boalt Hall. If you go into BigLaw, the economics are such that you will make it all back and so much more. Remember, law is a monopoly. And, if you're going into public interest, Edley's got you covered with LRAP. So, if necessary, raise away!
Well said 12:20.
I say raise away. But be sure to focus a portion of those new funds on LRAP and financial aid. If the financial aid people are doing their job, they will know which students are most likely to be irrationally deterred by the increased fees and can direct financial aid packages accordingly.
11:21, I think that such efforts would in large part deal with your concerns, though of course not entirely.
As for 8:37 a.m., I am sorry you feel alienated. I am glad there is one person in NYC that reads the WSJ with whom you can commisserate. I'm sure there will be some at the Bob Barr meeting this week too. However, never again let it be said there is not a conservative-victim-complex (moderate in their own minds) here at Boalt Hall. Don't worry, you only have to be around us "crazy radicals" for 3 years at most.
I also say raise away, on the condition, though, that NONE of those fees go toward UC Berkeley undergrads or any other school at UC Berkeley. The purpose of the fee raise is to support the excellence of an elite law school, not subsidize a marginally elite undergrad school at the expense of law students. The Regents should raise student fees for undergrads if they need more undergrad money and can't find it elsewhere. If the state is financially abandoning the UC system, then any money that its students pay should go toward benefiting those students' programs, not other students' programs. Otherwise, basic principles of fairness are violated. I feel very passionately about this point and hope that the Boalt administration is protecting our interests on this score.
8:37 here... I never said anything about being a victim. I don't feel particularly victimized. I'm getting a good education that will serve me well, then I'm moving on. If I felt like a victim, I would transfer. My attempt was to make a purely economic point: Edley's fundraising might be more effective if it was less political.
2:31:
Please don't let one anonymous commenter's thoughts on a blog represent for you an entire spectrum of political thought among Boalt students. To take a sentiment of feeling disaffected as proof of a victimhood complex is crappy reasoning.
By the way, I agree with your other points. See you at the Barr talk?
I think grades are back up, at least those that were posted earlier.
11:21,
No one is forcing anyone into BIGLAW. There's a very generous LRAP program for those who wish to pursue public interest careers -- the most generous, in fact, of any peer institution.
hey folks, grades are up.
Hmmm ... my only grade that's up was one that was reported 2 weeks ago but then vanished.
So, not all grades are up, though there are finally placeholders for them.
My conjecture is that grades that were entered in eGrades before the great crash are up. But grades that the professors were blocked from entering are not yet on BearFacts. So, don't count on all your grades being up.
But let's compare notes.
I had nothing before the crash. Now I have 3 of 5 grades, and placeholders for the rest.
I think there are three relevant periods:
1. Grades posted early that you could have seen on BearFacts a few weeks ago under "current term" grades.
2. Grades that professors had uploaded through eGrades during the period when BearFacts showed nothing in both "current" or "prior" terms (so you had never seen them before)
3. Grades that the professors were unable to upload because eGrades stopped letting teachers post until the problem was fixed
My theory is that categories (1) and (2) are available, whereas category (3) can't be available because the professors haven't even entered them into eGrades yet.
If professors enter them into eGrades tomorrow, they likely won't be available until Wednesday.
I also used to have nothing. And I still have no grades, but placeholders were entered. I don't know if that is helpful at all.
Yeah, I think 9:46 PM is onto something. The system seems to be showing grades that were either posted a few weeks back or uploaded (but never posted b/c the system was down) in the interim period.
Remember when Armen posted Talley's email. He said he couldn't even enter the grades onto eGrades yet because the program was down. Other professors had entered them a few days before eGrades was shut down, but those grades were probably stuck in the bottleneck. Now that the program seems to be up again, professors will post the rest of the grades.
Does this mean WE CAN APPROACH Talley now?
7:58 - my understanding is that Prof. Talley is in a committed relationship. That said, I think those infamous white jeans are still available through the soon-to-be defunct Berkeley Law Foundation.
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