Publication Date
1-1-2022
Document Type
Article
Organizational Units
Sturm College of Law
Keywords
Legal education, Law school grading
Abstract
The notion of a well-being crisis among law students is more than an anecdotal concern. Empirical research has shown that students tend to enter J.D. programs with typical mental health and then rapidly decline over the course of the first year.1 This decline is found across metrics of subjective well-being, including positive affect, life satisfaction, self-determination, and intrinsic motivation.2 Moreover, studies find that law students have elevated rates of chronic anxiety, depression, social alienation, substance abuse, and suicide.3 In short, law students experience “major psychological distress” during their legal education.4 Why might this be the case? An intuitive answer, backed by a substantial literature, is that this distress is largely tied to the “competitive, isolating and adversarial” nature of legal education,5 with one leading culprit in particular: grading.6 The curved, hierarchical grading system used by most law schools may tend to foster among students a chronic and deleterious experience of “grade anxiety.”7 So, what would happen if law school grades suddenly disappeared?
Publication Statement
Copyright held by the authors. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Originally published as John Bliss & David Sandomierski, Learning Without grade Anxiety: Findings from the Pass/Fail Experiment in North American Legal Education, Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 555 (2022).
Recommended Citation
John Bliss & David Sandomierski, Learning Without grade Anxiety: Findings from the Pass/Fail Experiment in North American Legal Education, Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 555 (2022).