no more alphabet soup

Faculty at Standford Law School voted last week to cease the use of letter grades in measuring student achievement: http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/02/stanford. Stanford joins Yale and Berkeley as the only institutions to take such action, and there's already immediate expectations that Harvard Law will follow suit.

I think this is an ingenious idea. I think it would be a horrible action to take at the high school level, an inappropriate measure at the undergraduate level, but a useful and logical precedent to set at the graduate level. Grades are important evaluative measures of student performance. As a college admission officer, I place much emphasis on how well students have performed in the classroom when making decisions. I place equal emphasis on what students have accomplished outside the classroom in making decisions as well. I'm also aware that the importance of grades is overshadowed by process of learning and immersing oneself into a subject matter. In cutthroat environments like those often found at highly competitive law schools, the pressure to achieve A's drowns out the pleasure of learning something new and the anticipation of putting acquired knowledge to use.

I'll repeat: grades are important. Though casting aside the caste system of letter grades, Stanford, Yale and Berkeley still assign a measure of performance to their students.
Correctly identifying and distinguishing those students whose academic achievements stand out from those of their peers is important, just as it's important to celebrate their peers for their accomplishments in athletics, service, leadership, etc. Grades are an important factor in correctly admitting students to an undergraduate or graduate program, but again, they're one of numerous important factors. When reviewing college applications, I'll give equal consideration to a student who is in the top 1% of his class and a student who is in the top 51% of his class. Granted, the first student has much better odds at being admitted to a selective institution, but both merit equal consideration.

What I'm hearing from people - you know, out there on the streets - is that many employers, especially law firms, will only interview students in the top 10%, top 25%, etc. of their class. Seriously?! It's not possible at a competitive law school that an artful litigator is ranked in the top 27% of her class? It's not possible that an outstanding future advocate of the wrongfully accused is ranked in the fourth decile of his class? Maybe such students didn't perform as well on their exams, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't learn as much or gain as pertinent experience as those who did.

The point I'm hoping to make is that anyone and everyone is worth a look. Employers who know what they're doing place little emphasis on a candidate's GPA while placing strong emphasis on a candidate's reflections and insights from earning a degree, on their goals and aspirations, and on their personality and presence. Admission officers who know what they're doing carefully consider GPA's, SAT's and other statistical variables against qualities of character, ethic, and passion. So if Stanford, Yale and Berkeley have found a way to open doors previously shut to the majority of students by eliminating the traditional letter grades that unfortunately become labels, then I'm all for it.