Cornell Law School is reportedly among the first law schools to move to pass-fail grading for the semester. It’s very likely we’ll see many more (particularly elite schools, or at least they’ll star the trend) schools doing so. This, like many decisions made in the coronavirus outbreak and Covid-19 illness spread, will simply be a cascade. I’m mostly against such proposals (but have no influence over them!), and I thought I’d explain why.

I have small experience thinking about this, having taught during a nearly three-week evacuation from Malibu for the Woolsey fires. No classes were held remotely, class periods were compressed, and the exam period was shortened.

Grades are an imperfect measure student performance, but they do pretty well to identify students who will perform well on the bar exam and students who are most at risk. They are also deeply valued by employers, judges looking for clerks, and so on. Grades are not the only thing, of course—good grades do not guarantee good jobs. But they are usually necessary, if not sufficient. (For those privileged to enjoy special family connections or status for legal employment, grades are usually not necessary.)

Assuming a law school should grade (and some might challenge this, as a few particularly elite schools offer little more than premium “pass-fail” grading—and particularly as many law professors came from those schools), the question is what these circumstances do to change the presumption of grading into pass-fail.

Obviously, the disruption is significant. Many students are displaced physically from dorms or homes. Most classes will be taught in a new online format, either synchronous or asynchronous. Some students will not have access to their physical textbooks and need to rely on other materials. Still others hare dealing with travel restrictions, or, worse, illnesses of themselves or loved ones.

All real concerns. At the same time, there are a couple of ways to look at disruption. One is disruption that affects everyone—and if we’re all in it together, we can all suffer along together, expecting, yes, some individual resiliency that may vary from person to person, but, on the whole, grading (which is typically distributed across pre-set grading criteria) will remain largely unchanged.

Another is disruption that uniquely affects a subset of the student population. Of course, these things happen every semester—the student with a death in the family, with a significant illness, with some personal problem that disrupts the term. Schools typically accommodate the student through leave or other policies, but rarely (I think) to take a course pass-fail. It’s simply that this is happening on a much larger scale, so many more people are collectively identifying issues that may affect them.

If pass-fail becomes optional, in some ways it ends up worse. Students who opt for a pass-fail grade immediately put less effort into the course. That artificially inflates the grades of the remaining students who are taking the exam on a graded basis. Depending on which cohorts opt for pass-fail, it can skew classes in bizarre ways.

Now, maybe these reasons aren’t persuasive, and you think that shifting to pass-fail, given the seriousness of the disruption and some varying levels of uncertainty, is the right call. I want to call attention to a few sub-populations that likely will be disadvantaged by this decision.

First, students in classes where they have done well on already-graded midterms or interim assessment. Yes, that’s a rarity in law school. But for those students, they have put in work and received feedback that should, I think, be seriously considered as a component of their final performance for the sake of employers and judges looking at transcripts.

Second, academically at-risk first-year law students. Schools will place at-risk law students on probation after their first semester. A few “figure out” law school in the second semester and do well. That takes them off probation and puts them on track to graduate. Students without that opportunity are facing academic dismissal.

Third, students who “figure out” law school after one semester—often, in my anecdotal experience, those who come from professional careers with a gap between undergrad and law school. While there’s a high correlation between first semester and second semester grades, a small set of students will do exceedingly well.

Fourth, students fighting resume bias. Pass-fail makes it very easy for employers to rely on other measures like undergraduate and law school reputational quality. If they can’t rely on grades, they’ll rely on other proxies.

Back to the opening point, pass-fail is a luxurious advantage for the highest-ranking law schools. They can easily move to pass-fail and know that the vast majority of their students will experience little difference in likelihood of employment outcomes.

For many other students at the vast majority of law schools, however, I do think there will be disadvantages to moving to pass-fail.

Maybe I’m overstating it, and maybe there won’t be a significant change in judges’ or employers’ experience. Maybe the concerns of the students who I identified as potentially disadvantaged should be outweighed by the concerns of others. But I offer my own thoughts here and look forward to reading more of the robust debates in the days ahead—and to seeing how law schools react.

UPDATE: Three reflections on this. First, Prof. Maggie Wittlin writes, “The strongest argument I've heard in favor of pass/fail is that certain groups of students will be disadvantaged by maintaining grades, specifically, students with fewer resources, who can't access reliably fast internet or quiet spaces for studying.” I think this is right. It’s about certain kinds of disruption that uniquely affect subsets of the student population, and how to balance their concerns with the other concerns I laid out. No easy answers, but I don’t want to minimize the cast for pass-fail. In some circumstances or at certain schools, these kinds of factors can cut in favor of moving there. But, in my view, we’d want more than general statements before doing so.

Second, this position shouldn’t be confused with a lack of empathy for students! I don’t defend grading as some kind of “tough life lesson,” as learning to be “resilient” in the face of challenges, or so on. That feels more like a right of passage or a kind of hazing justification, which I think must fail. Instead, it’s to look at the value of grades—i.e, the value we assign to them before a disruption like this arises—and to weigh that value with the costs and benefits of switching in the midst of a challenging time like this. By all means, I emphatically defend accommodations for students, and consideration of whether, on the whole, alterations to grading should be made. It’s simply that, I think, the “solution” of pass-fail grading comes with problems that are often beneath the surface.

Third, there are more creative “optional” pass-fail structures out there, like allowing students to opt in after looking at their grades, or setting a “cutoff” and taking a pass-fail only if they perform below the cutoff. Solutions like these can help mitigate the distorting effects of an optional system by increasing the incentives for all students to work hard and help keep a more competitive performance on the exam. That said, any “optional” system invites student second-guessing, agonizing, gamesmanship, and curiosity of how decisions might affect the behavior of others—things I’ve experienced (none very good) in “optional” pass-fail settings, and things probably worthy of a separate and more extensive blog post.