Law Students, Faculty Discuss Grade Reform

About 75 first-year law students met yesterday with professors and Derek C. Bok, Dean of the Law School, in another skirmish of the grade reform war.

Student speakers, charging that the school's competition divides and isolates students, argued for complex curricular reform including pass-fail grading, mandatory written assignments, and smaller classes.

Faculty members spoke against most of the changes with the same arguments they used in an unsuccessful attempt to block limited grade reform last year: shortages of funds and the possibility that hiring would be done by means of influence, race, or religion if there were no grades.

Alan M. Dershowitz, professor of Law, said it is "unseemly" for students to object to extreme competition and large classes when they were accepted into the school because of their previous competition, and since many of them would not have been admitted if the school's classes-which number over 500-were not too large.