Making The Grade

PRETEND for a moment that you are a first-year law student. You've worked hard all semester, you've participated in class, you've done the reading. Then you sit down at the three-hour final exam, and you freeze up. C-on the exam means C-for the course.

In the old days, you would have had to kiss Law Review good-bye Election to the prestigious student-oriented journal was based entirely on first-year grade point averages. That practice ended in 1969, when the review began to select half of its members on the basis of a written competition in the tall of students' second-year.

Last week, in the face of student pressure, the review further down graded the importance of grades. By a one-vote margin--the Law Review president casting the decisive vote--the review decided to count grades as two-thirds of one half of the competition.

This isn't good enough.

First-year grades should not count at all in the selection of Law Review editors Membership on the review is too prestigious--in terms of job opportunities and relations with faculty members--to be based on something so inappropriate as first-year marks.

While grades have their uses, the fact is, performance on a three hour first-year final exam does not necessarily translate into legal scholarship skills, good writing or editing ability, or any other virtue that the Law Review might reasonably desire.

Moreover, reliance on such criteria promotes unnecessary anxiety among first-year-students. Ironically, it was this very anxiety which induced more than 400 first-year students to sign a petition to deny the Law Review access to their grades. Since this petition was the catalyst for the recent change in policy, the Law Review's emphasis on grades in this sense backfired.

But the new policy won't be much better. It has the beneficial side effect of forcing people to actively try out for the Review, rather than having membership bestowed upon them, since everyone has to take part in the writing competition. But grades still count, under a mysterious formula that the Law Review is keeping under wraps.

The organizers of the first-year petition say that they will continue their efforts, but many first-year students may have been placated by the Law Review's compromise position. We hope that they will continue to hold out for the total abolishment of grades as criteria for Law Review selection.