What law school has taught me about grades...

Grades are not worth the paper they are printed on or the space they take up in cyber-world.

I have 2 friends who don't check their grades. One doesn't check them because she doesn't want to know. She assumes that if she loses her scholarship because of grades, that she'll get a letter in the mail and unless that happens, she's doing fine. The other friend doesn't check them on principle. She thinks they are bunk and I agree.

I think the worst thing about law school was the emphasis put on grades. My dad thought (and still thinks) that grades are the end-all be-all of law school; that good grades equals success. I whole heartedly disagree. I'm a week away from finishing law school and my dad is still trying to throw incentives at me for good grades. "If you make a 3.5 this semester, I'll give you $500." Fuck you, Dad! Give me $500 cause you love me or cause you are proud of me or, God forbid, because I need it. But don't try to bribe me with money. It didn't work when I was 5 and it's not going to work when I'm 25. Maybe you should give it another couple decades and try again when I'm 45.

I have had classes where my grades adequately reflected the work I put in and how much I learned. But more often than not, that wasn't the case. Whoever said that law school grades were arbitrary was 100% right.

I tend to rate my professors by how adequately I thought my grade correlated to what I learned. The bad professors never added up. The good professors pretty much gave me what I deserved. I never got below a C and I had my share of As. The end result was a solid B average. The undeserved A- I got in commercial transactions balanced out the undeserved C I got in jurisprudence. The undeserved A I got in property balanced the undeserved C+ I got in Contracts. And the quite deserved A I got in my religion class balanced out the quite deserved C I got in corporations.

So basically, grades don't mean shit. I guess my final grade point average is some sort of reflection of the overall kind of student I am, but the details just don't add up. Here is my advice to brand new law students: if you are sitting around, spending your Christmas and New Year's Eve biting your nails in anticipation of what professor scumbag is going to give you in civil procedure, your time is better spent with family, kissing your New Year's Eve date, taking down Christmas decorations, gorging yourself on gingerbread cookies, or even pruning the new bonsai tree you got for Christmas. And don't worry! If you got a C you didn't deserve from professor scumbag, you will probably get an A you also didn't deserve from another inept professor. Either way - life will go on! And in the end, the girl with the 2.5 may have the job of her dreams fall into her lap and the one with a 4.0 may never find the one she's looking for. As for me and my 3.0 - well, the jury is still out!