HLS Announces New Grading System

Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan announced a finalized plan to transition current students to the new four-tiered pass/fail grading system yesterday.

Under the transition scheme, first-year students will receive grades of “Honors,” “Pass,” “Low Pass,” and “Fail,” as stipulated by the new system in all their courses, starting this semester. Third-year students will finish their last year under the old system, which has nine categories spanning A+ to F.

Second-year students, whose fate in the transition was most uncertain, will graduate with a transcript with grades under both systems. They will receive letter grades through this year, and then switch to the pass/fail system as third-year students.

Latin honors will be determined by a student’s performance during all three years.

In an e-mail sent to the student body, Kagan wrote that delaying the transition until next year for second-year students would allow them to demonstrate improvement from their first year. At a town hall meeting earlier this month, Kagan said she agreed that some people “take a while to get used to the thing” and perform better after their first year—including herself.

“Numerous students...thought that applying it midstream would further highlight their first-year grades and deprive them of a chance to show that they could do better than they had done under the traditional system,” Kagan wrote in the e-mail.

While a majority of second-year students said that they would have preferred that the new grading scheme go into effect immediately, so that they would have two years to take advantage of its benefits, Kagan wrote that a “substantial minority” raised concerns about applying the new system to their class at all.

As a result, the Law School decided to pursue the “middle course” that resolved the issue in a “judicious, even if by no means perfect” way, according to Kagan.

HLS student government president David K. Kessler ’04, who helped compile feedback from second-year students, said he thought the plan addressed nearly all of the different concerns his peers have pointed out.

“It put together a lot of things people said separately,” said Kessler, a third-year student. “I think it was sort of ingenious.”

The transition will be completed during the 2009-2010 school year, when all students at the Law School will receive grades under the new scheme for the first time.

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.