Whine and You Shall Receive
Just responding to a request for a forum for 1Ls to complain about being graded for WOA this year. We all need to whine sometimes, particularly during finals, so let me indulge you.
I sympathize with you guys. As one commenter pointed out, having a P in WOA wouldn't exactly be ideal for those with an interest in litigating (though I don't think it's fatal). It is a nice opportunity for strong writers, who might not do well in first-year required courses, to set themselves apart. I also agree with McWho that the complaint about the curve could apply equally to doctrinal classes.
I will go ahead and strongly disagree with the person who said the only feedback you're getting is your letter grade and some "checkmarks." That's patently untrue. From TA feedback to instructor draft feedback to oral argument feedback to final brief feedback, everyone involved in WOA worked pretty hard to make sure you knew where you stood and how you could improve.
Have at it.
I sympathize with you guys. As one commenter pointed out, having a P in WOA wouldn't exactly be ideal for those with an interest in litigating (though I don't think it's fatal). It is a nice opportunity for strong writers, who might not do well in first-year required courses, to set themselves apart. I also agree with McWho that the complaint about the curve could apply equally to doctrinal classes.
I will go ahead and strongly disagree with the person who said the only feedback you're getting is your letter grade and some "checkmarks." That's patently untrue. From TA feedback to instructor draft feedback to oral argument feedback to final brief feedback, everyone involved in WOA worked pretty hard to make sure you knew where you stood and how you could improve.
Have at it.
posted by Jackie O at 7:24 PM
40 Comments:
Dear whining 1L:
Are you in the class of 2010 or 2011? No? Then you can take your complaint and stuff it...
If you're asking me, I'm not a 1L. I have no interest in whining, just in facilitating the whines of others.
The ones who complain that they didn't get any feedback are the same students who never took the class seriously to begin with. You can only get out of a class what you put into it. Both the instructors and TAs put in countless hours in reading and commenting the briefs. The TAs took time to conference with the students. If you showed up to the conference unprepared, without any questions about how to improve your writing or the substance of your arguments, then your final brief is gonna demonstrate that. The TAs and instructors were all there to ask questions and help you improve your work. If you didn't take advantage of that, then tough.
Maybe this is just more of a gripe about the grading system when there's only 25 kids in the class...but having to walk into EIW w/ a P in WOA when you scored slightly above median is awful...there's a critical mass of students who didn't give a crap and I'm livid that I have to share the same grade with them when I spent a ridiculous amount of time on the brief, came to every conference with an extensive list of questions, got positive feedback on my drafts, and have mostly "good jobs" all over my final brief.
If everyone pulled their weight in that class, I'd (like to think I would) accept my P with dignity, knowing that everyone with that grade a) pulled their weight and b) wrote their brief well.
Long story short - plenty of students who worked hard in this class / lost plenty of sleep / took every bit of advice the TAs gave and asked for more will have Ps in that class.
it is possible to rationally complain about WOA being graded (there are some pretty compelling arguments actually). but doing so on the basis that you did not get sufficient feedback during the course of the semester is patently absurd and makes you sound like an entitled moron (unless you happened to get the two worst TAs and worst instructor that exist, although even then I'm guessing they gave you solid enough feedback).
the "Ps at OCIP" complaint is also pretty lame for multiple reasons. first, it's not gonna be the end all be all...i'm guessing most employers will be much more focused on your other grades. second, i'm guessing that if you got a p it was either because you didn't put in nearly enough time over the course of the semester (a perfectly reasonable approach for most people, but not for a whining, grade-obsessed person like yourself), weren't diligent enough when it came time to putting the finishing touches on your brief, or are just simply not a very good writer. that may sound harsh, but if none of those three things are true, you would almost definitely have done better than 60% of your peers. most of them probably appreciated the feedback they got, didn't care that much about their grade, and are well on their way to being far more pleasant than you to work alongside at some office in the future.
10:16 here, just want to clarify that my comment was not directed at 10:04 (who makes a *somewhat* more sane and sincere gripe than the person from the other thread who pissed me off)
How the hell do you people think you got into Boalt? By "working harder" than all the students who applied to Boalt and ended up at Golden Gate? Or by submitting a stronger application?
Newsflash: school and for that matter law are not about who worked hardest or how much time you spent. They are about who wrote the better brief.
A glance at your writing sample will tell employers much more than your lone grade in WOA. If you do good work, learn to write like a lawyer, end up with P in WOA, and don't land a job at OCIP, you should blame it on some combination of macroeconomic forces and your interview skills. Not on your school's grading system.
/rant
10:16 here open challenge to anyone to give me one good reason why we should not change our grading system.
10:16, change the grading system to what? Something that gives everyone or most everyone a big shiny gold star? Here are two reasons to not do that, and a parting thought.
First, it would do a true disservice to the students who are doing work that stands out among the stiff competition at Boalt. My experience as a two-time TA in WOA was that students' abilities fell along a curve: most people do passable work, a few don't give a damn, a few truly shine, and the rest fall between. Those who do work in the top 1/3 deserve recognition.
Second, it would make our school's grades seem even more like a joke than they already do. That you can do work in the bottom 1/3 of the class and essentially sail through as part of the great, undifferentiated middle already frustrates people who screen Boaltie applications. (I know because I have screened clerkship applications. I don't know how many times I had to explain our "system" to my judge, who looks at Boaltie applications every year!) I don't think that blurring those lines even more would increase the total number of Boalties who get hired. It would only reduce the number who land more competitive jobs.
It may seem nice, I suppose, to let everyone walk out of Boalt on equal footing -- i.e., unattached to a grade curve or class standing. But the truth is that some students are superior candidates, and in a world where Boalties compete with ranked students from other top ten schools, employers need to know who those stellar Boalties are. Those students students deserve recognition and, at any rate, those employers demand it.
My parting thought is to point out that this is, after all, only about grades. Law, life, and love are all much bigger than the letter they put next to "WOA" on your transcript. My own opinion is that it is important to keep that perspective.
In response to Patrick's defense of the grading system I'd like to say that I got a of of Ps in classes I worked really hard in and where I knew the material really well. I got quite a few Hs (and even some HHs) in classes that I didn't take seriously and skated through. THIS is my problem with the curve. It doesn't measure how well you knew that material or performed in that class, it only measures you against how much effort your peers put into the class. So in a class where everyone is falling over themselves to impress the prof (Fed Courts) you can put in all your effort, write an excellent exam, and still get a P. However, in other classes you can write a reflection piece and be in the top ten percent.
Patrick, your argument seems like one supporting the grading system reform. I would wholly support a normal ABC grading system over the crap we have now. In fact, the grading system we have now is basically the shiny gold star treatment you describe.
Your argument did nothing to defend the curve and in fact argued against it in having a more normal grading system.
Last, I find it absolutely laughable that you think you have the magical ability to objectively grade briefs, especially since my presumption is such grading is not anonymous. I am not a 1L and thank goodness for that, but the fact that someone thinks they can objectively grade a non-anonymous brief goes against even the most basic human psychology.
@ 11:24 - the grading is *not* anonymous, and I think that is a big part to what is contributing to people's "whining." A lot of us have gotten to know our WOA/LRW profs well, so it's difficult to not take getting a P personally.
Your WOA instructor thinks your writing sucks despite knowing you well? This does not help your argument.
That said, I think it sucks that WOA is graded.
the single best reason to have WOA graded: your writing skills will be incredibly important in any legal career, and if those skills need some significant work, it's better to be jolted into that realization by a P than left blissfully unaware with a CR
forget about potential employers. if you are a 1L, your WOA grade should be a helpful measuring stick FOR YOU of your own legal writing ability. if you got a P, there is a tiny chance that you are a fantastic legal writer and that someone else screwed you into what you consider a crappy grade. but more likely it is simple, reasonably accurate, and valuable feedback for you that you should take some steps to improve your legal writing ability. and it's good to get that feedback now while you still have plenty of time to improve!!!
this summer, if any of you 1Ls (or 2Ls for that matter) get some really harsh feedback on your first assignment, you can either pout and insist to yourself that you actually did a fantastic job and that the supervising attorney is wrong, or you can take advantage of the feedback, seek out more, and make meaningful strides to improving your lawyering/writing. even if it turns out that the attorney was wrong and your first assignment was god's gift, worst thing that happens to you is you develop your skills even further.
Why was the grading not anonymous though? That's a HUGE part of the integrity of our grading system.
Not a 1L, but all the grade probably means is how much the teacher liked you rather than the quality of your writing.
I support WOA being graded. It is a monumentally important class and, at the end of the day, we all took it more seriously because it was graded. I think this is true even for the folks who took LRW very seriously. If you have one class that is not graded, and three that are, there will necessarily be times that you put that ungraded class on the back-burner. I don't there are many 1L's who can honestly say that they did not put more effort into the brief than they did the final LRW memo (controlling for the differences in the level of difficulty between the two problems, of course).
That said, I do think there could be more *concrete* feedback. I emphasize concrete because I think there was as much "soft" feedback as you wanted. The TA's and instructors were always available in my section and the same was true for the multiple people that I've talked to in other sections.
But I think it would have been helpful to know, in addition to the changes you need to make, where you would have fallen had that draft been a final brief. So it would be cool if the instructors could rank the drafts and then tell you "this would have been an H" or "this would have been a low P" (differentiating between the P's would be necessary I think, since 60% is such a large amount).
The problem is that you don't know what kind of brief you would be submitting even if you made every single correction suggested by your instructor/TA's. Many students mislead themselves into thinking "if I fix everything they pointed out, it will have to be a HH, right?" But in reality you could be upgrading your brief from a low-P to a mid-P, since the comments may have had to focus on major structural problems instead of refining prose. For that reason, and others, it can be a bit of a black box until the actual grades come out.
But I don't think this means that the grading of WOA should be abandoned... just improved.
First off, the complaints about non-anonymous grading are stupid. For one, instructors DO a blind read of final briefs and that score is incorporated in the grade. Second, grading can't be totally anonymous because attendance and participation are factored in. Third, I feel pretty confident that our (awesome) instructors are capable of separating your annoying personality from your grade.
Corey makes a good point about not knowing where you stand grade wise during drafts. I think logistically this change could be hard, since TAs each read 8 or so briefs per round. It would be impossible to rank them without either reading all of the briefs (not happening) or using some kind of rubric to give them a score. I think instructors were very careful to avoid even the appearance of TAs taking part in the grading process (after all, we're students too) so using a rubric could be tricky.
LMAO at a 1L telling us about what is and is not a monumentally important class. Your extensive legal experience must have lead you to that conclusion. I love 1Ls already thinking they can tell us about the values of a legal education.
Well deserved P in WOA Corey!
Great point, 9:54. What was I think to suggest that learning how to research and write is important in law?
Thanks for setting me straight.
wholeheartedly agree with Corey - the "soft" feedback of "excellents" and "good jobs", most likely in a well-intentioned attempt at being encouraging, lead students to believe that they were doing better than they actually were. Something along the lines of "this is what people who scored better than you did that you didn't" would have been very helpful feedback.
Were grades given in the packets 1Ls picked up? My prof just gave a median score for the class...?
A lot of these complaints just sound like complaints about the grading system generally.
If your writing is strong and you still get a P, then your writing skills will still show in your writing sample.
This system actually lets the instructors highlight more strong writers than in the past by giving them HHs and Hs.
I think it is a big mistake to grade the course. There's just too much subjectivity in a skills-based class (compared to say, a memorization & final-based class) for the grades to really reflect the gamut of ability. While the courses don't reward the top 40% under the old system, they do reward the top brief, top oral argument, etc.
I'm curious as to how many people will use the skills they get in brief writing & oral arguments in their careers. I know I won't in patent prosecution. Corporate lads and ladies don't. Tax? Further, do the WOA skills translate over to the criminal spectrum?
If i had pull a number out of you know where and guess, I would say that less than 50% of Boalt grads actually write briefs & give oral arguments. For the rest of us, WOA and the like is just another annoying and useless part of school that we want to get through with as little effort as possible. Which makes the grades suck.
/end whine
1:47--Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you're right that less than 50% of Boalt grads will use the skills they acquire during WOA. (I actually doubt you're correct, but let's run with your assumption anyway.) Isn't your complaint true of most (all?) classes in the first year of law school?
What percentage of students, for example, will need to work with property law in their professional careers? Or, to take an even more obvious example, how much time will most graduates spend interpreting the constitution?
Some classes are more useful than others, of course. But, outside of perhaps Civil Procedure, I can't think of a class that will be more relevant to more students than LRW/WOA.
If your premise is that a class should be graded only if at least 50% of the students will use knowledge acquired during that class during their professional careers, then the entire first year should be Credit/No Credit.
2:24 - You're forgetting that first year courses are by and large all bar courses, and so justification exists for having to learn the material despite small likelihood that any particular student will practice in any particular class area. We can debate the pros and cons of the bar covering the subjects it does, but that's sort of outside of the realm of this discussion.
My problem here is that grades are being awarded for a class where half of the students have a professional stake in learning the material at the expense of half of the students who have no motivation (aside from the grades) to even try. I suspect that if the courses were optional, people that will use LRW & WOA skills will be less likely to support grades.
Just my $.25, as I have no stake here at all. But I do know that I did the very bare minimum in both LRW and WOA in order to focus on things I cared more about (Intro to IP namely), and I feel I benefited as a result.
Right, Toney, because being a good legal writer has nothing to do with the bar exam.
I didn't know that so few lawyers ever had to write anything as part of their jobs. Interesting.
3:08 - One thing I learned from BarBri is that being a good writer (legal or otherwise) has nothing to do with being a good writer for the purposes of passing the bar. You memorize choice phrases for each subject and write out a well-organized but disjointed set of rules that apply to the particular facts. It's very mechanical and is in no way "good legal writing". If you are spending time making something read nicely, then you are wasting time.
3:10 - You are of course confusing the type of writing skills taught in LRW and WOA with the writing skills required for many non-litigator positions. Not a big deal, but it reveals your general horse-blinder view of legal practice. Honestly, this is probably also LRW's & WOA's fault.
What I don't fully understand: why are we upset now? When they made the announcement in November, my first reaction was: this is not a good idea. People will get upset. I guess it's now sinking in because people who had the hubris to think they were guaranteed HHs and Hs are finally realizing the ramifications of this change?
I think instructors should provide more transparency as Corey and others have suggested. I also think that changing the policy in the middle of the year was kind of unfair. I viewed LRW as a class where I received full and honest feedback. In WOA, I believe my professor had to hold back her comments in order to not give me an unfair advantage. Also, I know people who completely slacked off during LRW in order to focus on their graded courses and were worried the instructors had formed a negative opinion of them after first semester. While I do agree with others that an instructor should be able to separate the writer from the person, I still prefer blind grading. Regardless, I think the policy should be to either grade both LRW and WOA or grade neither.
Oh Toney, still spewing your anti-litigation non-sense? Obviously, I think legal writing is much more important beyond litigation. It's weird that you mention that you don't need good legal writing in the patent prosecution world, considering there's a whole cottage industry of IP litigation that is essentially fed by poor drafting [I keed, I keed].
I do agree that WOA should not be equated with legal writing in general. Which brings us to the heart of the matter, a P in WOA. The grading allows those who excel in the class to be recognized as such, which is fine. So is the problem that someone at OCIP might not hire you because of a P in WOA? If that's really the case, there are a number of ways to deal with it, in my humble opinion.
For example, if you are interested in litigation, you're already probably doing a lot of things that involve legal writing. If the topic should arise in an interview in a worst case scenario, then don't be shy to turn the tables.
Disinterested Interviewer 1: "So, a P in WOA. What's the matter? Can't write a brief?"
You: "Well, the WOA grade is based on a number of different factors, and writing the final brief is only a part of it. We don't really know the precise breakdown of our grade. But I am very much interested in legal writing, and particularly good legal writing. As a first year, I joined XYZ Journal precisely because I wanted greater exposure to legal writing. This year as a [] editor, I will be spending quite a bit of my time working with authors to improve the quality of their articles. This summer I worked at [] in large part because it was a great opportunity to continue to hone my legal writing skills in the real-world and under the supervision of [non-profit attorneys/AUSAs/a judge/etc.]. As you can see from my resume, I drafted memos/briefs on [],[], and [], which to be frank, were much more rewarding than the artificially narrow confines of the WOA brief writing exercise."
If anyone has issues with your WOA grade after that, then you don't want to work for them. And needless to say these are my own views and not meant to be some magic script that you can recite. Think about your own unique situation and how best to highlight your strengths. Beyond that, this seems like much ado about nothing.
Anti-litigation? Of course not. The skill sets are completely different (as you admit), and LRW and WOA fail to address these skill sets.
I think a good solution here would be to require legal writing, but give many options on the type of legal writing you can take. I realize this may potentially shoe-horn people into a particular legal field before they know what they want to do, but they can always voluntarily take other writing courses later. And before you say "Well, they WOULDN'T voluntarily take the writing courses later", lets all remember that we are adults here and that people paying $150k for frameable wall-bling either 1) have their career's best interests at heart, or 2) deserve the suckcakes they bake.
The only reason LRW & WOA were even tolerable is because they were pass/fail.
*to address these other skill sets.
Maybe I should have paid attention in LRW...
I am with Toney on this one. Sorry, Armen. Thank goodness I am not a 1L. I remember the "feedbacks" I got ("good point" "very good" "this part is excellent" "maybe-ish you could add this teeny-tiny policy thing here and how about expanding a bit on that case?") that were completely useless. I am sure my instructor would have murdered my final grade - I was not well-liked, or at least that's the impression I got. I worked hard for that class because I wanted to be a litigator (!), but the whole hand-holding and feel-goody silliness that went with my LRW/WOA classes make me wonder how on earth anyone could distinguish top 10% or so from the rest top 60% or so. HH might be meaningful but I suspect most of the briefs are really, really similar in style, content etc. At least that's how it was last year in my class. One of my TA's who read a bunch of them told me just that, when I pressed him/her to tell me how he/she thinks I compare to the rest. Well, it could be that I really sucked and he/she was just being polite. There's always that.
Armen: Employers do not ask you about Ps, they just politely ding the people with them after the interview.
That's the case with any grading system ever created. Either the discussion is about a problem that is unique to a graded WOA course, or it's about how much it sucks to be compared to your peers. If the latter, then uh yeah. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but some employers do consider your performance. And given the minimal unit value of WOA, whether it's graded or not is inconsequential to this latter point.
Get over it people. It is a 1 unit class. If you want to be a litigator, hope that you're a good writer and that you worked hard enough. If you fulfill both of these criteria, you probably did fine. Enough of your classmates simply cannot write or do not care enough about WOA to get an H or an HH.
If you don't want to be a litigator, then it is just one P, and only one unit at that. You can explain away your P by saying that you want to do transactional work or whatever. Focus on the classes you like, get your P in WOA, and move on.
If you DO want to be a litigator and for some reason got a P in WOA, work hard this summer, get a great writing sample out of it, use that instead of your brief in EIW, and tell employers that your writing improved a lot over the summer. As long as your other grades are okay, you'll be fine.
Finally, to address people who complain about transparency, it is super awkward to tell people that their papers fell at the bottom of the pile. But at least some TA's and WOA profs are not afraid to say so when asked. If people asked me straight up where they fell in my pile of papers, I would honestly tell them. And even if they didn't ask, I know I was never shy to tell people when their papers were average / good / "needs a lot of work" (translation: bad).
Armen, that kind of a response in an interview would, as I'm sure you're aware, lead an interviewer to think, "Thou doth protest too much." Anachronistic use of the phrase acknowledged and ignored.
You can't effectively explain away Ps in interviews if the interviewer brings them up. You can only attempt to move on to more positive subjects. Most of the time, too many Ps will kill your interview silently (if at all) anyway.
That makes no sense. Of course you can explain a P. You can explain anything. In fact, you're about to enter a profession that's going to pay you to explain lots of inexplicable things.
And I'm still not sure how the great fear of silent rejection is relevant to anything. Could be the Ps, could be the foul aftershave, could be speaking in Shakespearean tongues.
There's a very good chance your mid-semester update would have looked like this:
You: "Can you tell me where I stand with respect to my classmates?"
Truly Honest TA: "Um, well, I read one brief that was really quite good and another that actually didn't smell TOO much like elephant dung. Your brief, like most of the rest, needs a fair amount of work. It is impossible for me to know for sure how of much of that is attributable to ability and how much to effort. Attempting to project the kind of grade you are likely to get would probably just open the door to you yelling at me later, and frankly, would be significantly more difficult than splitting the atom. That said, I've tried to give you comments that require a reasonable amount of effort from you, but I stopped short of giving you a numbered list of surefire ways to get an AmJur. Feel free to ask me or the instructor more questions or submit another draft."
You: "Word. So you're saying I have a very good chance? And that if I don't do really well it's because you didn't give me more feedback? Or because my hard-working and dedicated instructor is incapable of separating out her personal feelings. Or because all of us 1Ls are equally awesome at writing and grading us on a curve just doesn't make sense."
Truly Honest TA: " http://snipurl.com/27ts8l "
6:39, email me or Patrick.
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