Publication Date
1-1-2023
Document Type
Article
Organizational Units
Sturm College of Law
Keywords
Legal education, Covid-19, Law school grading
Abstract
Legal education has a long and shameful history of excluding women, people of colour, and people from working-class backgrounds.1 Quantitative diversity measures have shown gradual improvement, recently reaching parity on gender, while racial diversity continues to lag behind. Beneath the surface of this numerical story, a large body of literature has illuminated systemic inequalities in students’ lived experiences of law school.2 This article asks how historically under-represented groups experience one of the key features of legal education: grading. We examine this issue by exploring the singular moment in the history of the modern JD program when law schools across North America almost uniformly set aside curved grading in favour of Pass/Fail schemes at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020.
Publication Statement
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Originally published as David Sandomierski, John Bliss, and Tayzia Collesso, Pass for Some, Fail for Others: An Empirical Anaylsis of Law School Grading Changes in the Early Covid-19 Pandemic, 56.2 UBC L. Rev. 605 (2023).
Recommended Citation
David Sandomierski, John Bliss, and Tayzia Collesso, Pass for Some, Fail for Others: An Empirical Anaylsis of Law School Grading Changes in the Early Covid-19 Pandemic, 56.2 UBC L. Rev. 605 (2023).