From the Volokh Conspiracy:
It’s important not to let lower-than-expected grades become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Recognize the psychological game going on here: many students expect their fall 1L grades to give them a lightning bolt of insight about their future in the legal profession. Grades don’t do that, though: all they can do is measure how well you did relative to your classmates on a few 3-hour exams taken at a particular place at a particular time. Too many students think that grades are destiny, and begin to take steps to readjust their expectations to what they think is their destiny. Some students react to the sting of lower-than-expected grades by tuning out, by deciding law is dumb, and by concluding that they just aren’t good at it. The problem is that it’s just this kind of attitude that makes it less likely your grades will improve; by tuning out, you’ll only make it more likely that you won’t do as well as you should next time. My advice is to stick with it: get your old exams back, review them, and make sure you know what you did wrong. Then have faith in yourself and your smarts that you can improve your grades in the spring.
P.S. A commenter adds some advice for the “other half”:
There is also substantial risk for any law student who does too well his/her first semester, and fails to learn the appropriate lessons from that good performance. In the curved-law-school-grade game, performance is all relative. If you become complacent, or you think your study methods are sufficient when in fact you’re really just lucky, then you can easily find yourself on the other side of the grading curve in just one semester. This is especially true for 1Ls because you tend to compete against the same section pool during both semesters of the 1L year (at most schools I know, at least). It’s especially important for students with good grades to identify the reasons they got good grades, and to seek even more improvement. As the business gurus say, if you’re not getting better all the time, you’re falling behind.
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Categories: Law School
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January 29th, 2005 at 8:56:06 am
Orin is right, as far as he goes — 1L grades are not terribly important to how well you do overall in law school. You can recover from a poor 1L year. However, 1L is just about everything when it comes to getting the best jobs after school, because most firms make about 75% of their incoming associate hires from their summer associate ranks. To get a summer associate position between 2d and 3d year, 1L grades must be top 10%. Of course, this goes only for the major league law firms, such as Winston, Arnold & Porter, Mayer Brown, Wachtell and the other huge D.C., NY, and Chicago firms. Because, though, as Orin says, grades are an inferior measure of aptitude, you will find plenty of poor lawyers in the associate ranks at those firms, but you’ll find none who did not excel in law school.
January 29th, 2005 at 9:37:00 am
You’ll find, though, the “best jobs after school” are not always the best jobs in law. Far from it. In fact, I would estimate after five years something like 75% of a law school class has changed jobs AT LEAST once, if not more, looking for a better fit legally or personally. In my class from Notre Dame, we had 181 graduates I believe that something like less than 20 were still in their “first jobs” five years out.
It’s easy to get caught up in the race for the “best jobs” when you are in school because they are basically “the only jobs” you see being offered. I found many law students were rather immature about accepting jobs in school based on name recognition or city location rather than more relevant factors that go into “normal” acceptance of jobs (i.e. not in law school). This often left to them leaving after only 12 to 24 months because they simply miserable in the wrong town with the wrong kind of people doing the wrong kind of law.
I’m not sure I’d totally agree with “but you’ll find none who did not excel in law school.” Perhaps in the first few years at big firms this is the case, but as classes mature and laterals come in, you often find some of the best lawyers to have a rather mixed career, some with good grades, some without. Some from government, JAGs, academics, non-legal, some from big firms just moving upwards. I’ve actually found in mid-level and junior partners the one common factor is not good grades, but the the ability to pace oneself properly and have a certain balance in their life (i.e. not just someone who ‘crashes’ on project after project to get them done). Given the insanity of surviving the three years of school and the first five years of a firm, pace is definitely underrated as a quality, but probably one of the most important factors in surviving.
One other comment about grades though–negative grades (and the sometimes inane comments of those in school with good grades–just wait til interviews next year, you’ll see) often have the chilling effect on some students such that they “skip” interviews and don’t apply for jobs, fearful of the competition or rejection. This is a self-defeating action and one that I saw all too frequently in school. Take any interview you can get, even for jobs and firms you do not want, because honestly, I’ve yet to meet a single person EVER who has perfect interview skills (and I’ve interviewed hundreds). You can always use the practice, and you never know when you just might “strike a chord” with the interview such that you get a call back or offer for a position you didn’t think you could get when looking at it simply on paper.