While the world is in turmoil over the financial crisis, Harvard Law School has quietly adopted the Yale law grading method.  According to Eugene at VC, who let the cat out of the bag,

According to the e-mail that I had forwarded to me (and whose authenticity I have no reason to question), Harvard would technically have four grades — Honors, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail. My guess, though, is that Low Pass and Fail would be extremely rare, and 98%+ of all grades would be Honors or Pass, as they are at Yale. The shift then is basically from at least five commonly used grades (A, A-, B+, B, and B-, unless I’m mistaken) to two.

Apparently, Standford already went this route.  Now I was unaware of Yale’s grading system, or Stanford’s change, but now that it’s hit Harvard, another law school a neglected to attend, enough is enough.   Is nothing sacred?

Notice how Eugene described the “five commonly used grades” as involving only two letters of the alphabet, “A” and “B”.  Did the academy have to sell off the other letters to afford lawprof condominiums?  What happened to my good old friends, “C”, “D” and “F”?  Were they excessed?

This exercise in grade inflation happened when the rest of us were busy working, I guess, as my memory of law school was that some students did poorly.  Some flunked out.  Many got a bad grade in one course or another, usually the one involving the professor who insisted on long lectures in barely cognizable English.  That was always a pleasure, and a great opportunity to hone your Times crossword puzzle or Scrabble skills.

This is over, apparently.  All those resumes with astronomical GPAs meant nothing.  You had to be near brain-dead not to look like a star.  To do otherwise would have meant low self-esteem, and we certainly can’t have lawyers with low self-esteem.

This didn’t make sense to me until Orin Kerr stepped in and explained things for a dope like me:

So here’s a puzzle about the psychology of grading. Harvard and Stanford Law schools have recently announced moving from a letter grade system with pluses and minuses to a High/Pass/Low-Pass/Fail system. My sense is that most students like the change: Students perceive that it takes pressure off them.

But imagine a slight change. Imagine that instead of adopting the High/Pass/Low-Pass/Fail system, the schools kept the letter system and simply dropped pluses and minuses and the “D” grade. In other words, the possible grades became just A, B, C, and F.

My sense is that students would object strongly to such a system. They would object that it was too arbitrary and unfair, because a student who earned a very high B or a very high A would get no credit for it: They would just get the flat grade that didn’t reflect their achievement. Indeed, I suspect some students would say that removing pluses and minuses would increase the pressure on students by giving students a single bar to hit rather than more of a sliding scale.

Why is this a puzzle?

Because the two systems are exactly the same.  Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.  So why are these fine institutions of higher legal learning bothering with a shell game?  And are the brilliant students who attend these find institutions that stupid that they can’t tell it’s a shell game? 

But more importantly, are these same brilliant students, who will one day walk out in the world of lawyering so unbearably fragile that they can’t handle the standard grades that have, for better or worse, managed to characterize academic success and failure all these years? 

There is one thing that the academy has done a particularly poor job teaching, and appears still determined to screw up.  Once these young men and women embark on a career in the law, they will all lose at one time or another.  They need to learn to lose.  They need to learn to fight.  They need to learn to handle adversity and rise up to continue the fight.  As I wrote here :

A well-conceived law school education serves one purpose only:  to prepare you to confront the abuse of being a lawyer and prevail.  How to prevail comes later.  You’re not ready for that now.  For now, you need to learn how to toughen up and take abuse without crying and whining.  How to keep a smile on your face and deflect the humiliation that is designed to make even the most macho man shrivel.  If your lawprof doesn’t abuse you, she hasn’t done her job.  If your lawprof doesn’t toughen you up, then you’ve gained nothing.

If a law student has not done well in a course, then flunk him.  If he’s only done mediocre, then give him a “C”, or even a “C-“.  A client will thank you one day if you do.  Practicing law is not about feeling good about yourself, but learning how it feels to lose, and then still be able to fight again.  Don’t steal this from law students, even though they don’t know that they need it yet.