People in my class are weird. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but it's the adjective that I keep returning to. No one is sharing their grades. I know that isn't the case at some law schools, and I'm sure it's not true everywhere. I don't understand why it's a state secret with my classmates. We have all seen or been emailed the distribution of grades, and since there is a mandatory B curve, no one really did that badly (no one failed at least - the lowest grade in either Contracts or Torts was a C).
**SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ ON IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW MY GRADES**
I'm really happy with how I did, although I was very disappointed with Torts. Not just my grade, but the whole distribution. The professor refused to give anyone an A (philosophical opposition, I suppose). He basically told us as much. He worried that for every A he gave, he would have to give a C. So, the highest grade was an A-. He wound up giving Cs anyway (or it may have been C+, but same difference at that point). Five people got an A-. I got a B+. Now, I did "beat the curve," but had he graded fairly, those 5 people that wrote the "best answers" should have by definition, gotten an A. That would have bumped me to an A-. It's three-tenths of a point difference between B+ and A-, but the fact that the deck was stacked against us getting an A in the first place is what pisses me off.
Contracts was another story. The professor emailed us the distribution of grades, along with some feedback on the exam as a whole. Many people misunderstood basic Contract tenets, which surprised him. Didn't surprise me. I could have told him that there were people who "didn't get it." But, he didn't ask.
He did, however, award grades based on merit, and let the curve work itself out. One person got an A+, which was deemed "best exam." He stated that he rarely gives an A+, but this was as good as any he had seen in 30 years of teaching, and was "excellent from start to finish." (Not a bad critique). His lowest grade was a C. Since the awarding of an A+ has created some, let's call them issues, among some of the students, I feel I have to be delicate here because I know who got the A+. I will not name names here, however, since some people from my class may read this blog.
I will say, however, that I have an A average. You work it out.
1 comment:
Best post ever. I read this a few weeks ago, but I had to check out a book on statistics so that I could crack your math code and, wouldn't you know it, there is only one stats book in the entire university and it is, you guessed it, located in Piscataway . . . Stupid Piscataway.
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