Dishwashing thoughts on a law school regret

One of the lectures in my international law class was about multi-party negotiations. The professor decided to illustrate the point of how multi-party negotiations were virtually impossible by giving the class a negotiation where a decision could not be reached without unanimity. At first she tried doing something with dividing money among the people in the class, but she only used ten one-dollar bills, and we quickly decided as a class to send someone across the street to the creamery to buy us all root beer floats.

Obviously the stakes weren't high enough. Law students care deeply about money--can we say student loans?--but ten dollars wasn't enough to really start a negotiation. We needed higher stakes. This professor knew that another thing (the only other thing?) law students care deeply about is law school grades. She told us that if we could unanimously decide our grades for the class as long as we used a 3.3 median. There were thirteen people in the class. If seven would agree to get 3.3's for the course, then the rest of the class could get 4.0's.

Most professors adhere to the 3.3 median rule by grading on a simple bell curve. Many people get 3.3's, one gets a 4.0, and a couple of students fail with a 2.6 or lower. I'd guess that no one in that class had ever gotten a 4.0 in a law school course.

This professor was a gutsy lady. She taught the feminism and the race relations class at Brigham Young University, after all (loved them!).

What followed was a nail biter of a negotiation. There was only one issue, and there was no range of values. Either you agreed to take the 3.3 or you held out for the 4.0. One by one, students agreed to take a 3.3. One student was a transfer student, and she just needed to pass anyway. Another student admitted that even a 3.3 could only improve his GPA. Another student was a lawyer seeking continuing legal education credit who just needed to pass. Another student said she'd be willing to do it just to see if the professor would really hold to her promise to skip the final exam. One student did it just to be nice.

After five students had agreed to take 3.3's in the course, the discussion turned personal. The students were actively seeking out those who shouldn't care whether or not they got a 4.0 in the course. A girl turned to me and said, "What are your plans after graduation, Ms. Portia?" She looked pointedly at my six months' worth of pregnant belly.

"Having my baby," I said confidently. Why didn't I just stop there? Why didn't I actually make the girl try to convince me that a woman who has a baby immediately after law school has less of a reason to deserve good grades in law school than a woman who graduated single and virginal like her taut-bellied self? Instead I continued, "But, um, that doesn't mean that I don't need good grades because, you know, someday, I might need to get a job, and I need a good transcript from law school, right?" That was it: My one fleeting chance in law school to publicly defend my decision to attend law school, succeed in law school, and work full-time for my husband and my baby and not for the American justice system. And I pretty much flubbed it.

I was thinking today about why I regret my missed opportunity to take a stand for educated motherhood, but I don't regret my missed opportunity to take a stand for fair and accurate grading of knowledge and ability in a law school course. We were basically assigning grades based on who was kind enough or apathetic enough to accept an undeserved 3.3. I don't think anyone mentioned any qualms about how ridiculous this was.

Frankly, this didn't bother me in the least. After two and a half years of law school, one thing I'd absolutely learned was that grades, while not exactly arbitrary, weren't fair. Why not base grades on students' kindness, apathy, or stubbornness? Was that really all that different from exams based on attendance? Exams based on your tolerance for sleep deprivation? Your typing speed? The accuracy of your bootlegged lecture transcript? (Sidenote: I had excellent attendance, a high tolerance for sleep deprivation, a zippy typing speed, a famously accurate lecture transcript).

Also, I secretly suspected that there was no way this professor would let us get away with it. Things like that didn't happen in law school. There were rules against antics like these. In the end, one of the deans reread the 3.3 median rule, and determined that our method of assigning grades was against law school rules, and we would have to take a final comprehensive exam. On which I got a 3.8, thank you very much.

And really, isn't that how lawyers roll? They don't really worry too much about the higher moral implications of their arguments because (1) the world of the law is pretty immoral and unfair to begin with, and (2) in the end, if you get too crazy, someone always steps in to keep things predictable, if not necessarily fair.