Making the Grade: In School, In Business and In Litigation
Law.com reports that Stanford plans to drop letter grades as early as this fall. It will join a few other law schools that dropped letter grades and apparently some medical schools (“Stanford Law Drops Letter Grade System”). Instead of A+ to F, students will receive honors, pass, restricted pass and no credit.
The goals, according to Law.com, are to shift students away from a focus on grades and prevent course selections that factor in instructors’ grading habits.
I have no real concerns about which grading system Stanford will use in the fall. Rather, my interest in this story arises from more general concerns about defining clear goals and matching solutions to the goals.
In my view, there appears to be a disconnect between Stanford’s goals, as reported by Law.com, and its solution. If Stanford’s goal is really to shift the students’ focus from grades, a pass-fail system would be in order.
The story reminds me of an incident in my past as a manager in a large corporation. There was a perception at the time that there were too many meaningless promotions because of the structure of our salary scale. A proposal was floated to broaden the salary ranges within each pay grade but to provide for sub-grades within each range. I held the not-so-popular view that there was a disconnect between our goal and the solution because promotions within the new grades would be just as meaningless as the old promotions between the grades.
I am also reminded of litigation clients who were angry at the opposition and, at trial, wanted to discredit the other side with every innuendo and every bit of evidence of supposed falsehoods that they could possibly dredge up (and could be admitted). But, allowing ourselves to be distracted by side issues would create a disconnect with our overriding goal: to prove the elements of our client’s case (or disprove the opposition’s). Impeaching the other side’s witnesses, to be sure, was an important goal but we needed balance to have an effective litigation strategy. With counseling we were able to satisfy our clients and pursue an effective strategy.
I suspect that Stanford needed to balance other goals, for example, to satisfy large law firms that need or prefer quantifiable gradations in performance for recruiting. Or, they prefer to use language (“honors”) more appropriate to an academic setting.
In any case, the story reminded me to clarify my thinking if I wished to make the grade.
