Law Schools
Stanford Law School Drops Letter Grades
Posted Jun 11, 2008, 11:56 am CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Stanford University has become the third elite law school to drop letter grades.
Under the new system Stanford students will receive grades of honors, pass, restricted credit and no credit, reports Inside Higher Ed.
The system will change for students graduating in 2011, according to the Daily Journal (sub. req.). Students graduating before that will have the option of keeping their letter grades.
Law students don’t get letter grades at two other elite law schools: Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. Harvard is also discussing such a move, but so far it has made no announcement of a change. Insider Higher Ed says the debate is unlikely to move to lower tier schools, where students seek to distinguish themselves with higher grades.
Above the Law was the first to report the news, prompting more than 70 comments. One person wrote: “This fluffy grading is the luxury of schools in like the top five where grades don’t matter as much anyway. If you went to a 20-something school like I did, you need to be able to show you were in the top-whatever percent of your class to get into BigLaw, let alone federal clerkships.”
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