Yep, you read that right. Law school isn’t your undergrad. Among the many, many, many differences you will find between law school and undergrad, you will soon realize that sucking up to your law professor will not get you better grades.
The reason why? Two words: blind grading.
If you haven’t heard of blind grading before, it means that your professor grades papers anonymously. They don’t know whose paper they are grading until after they give the grade. The point of blind grading is your professor won’t say, “Oh, this is John’s test. John is such a nice guy; I’m going to take it easy on him.”
So yes, this means if you are being nice to a professor just to get a better grade in the class, you are not going to get anywhere. If you are blaming your bad grades on that one brown-noser in your class, you are wasting your time. When your professor starts to read an exam, they won’t know who wrote it.
This is not a bad thing though. Blind grading protects students from biased grading of their work and the work of their peers. You won’t get a lower grade than that one person because they’re the professor’s “favorite.” The professor has no idea whose paper they are grading.
You will be compared to your classmates because of curved grading in law school, however. Curved grading means that scores must fall along a predetermined distribution for any given exam. The exact number of As, Bs, Cs is predetermined and student’s scores are made to fit that distribution. Typically, scores are distributed on a bell curve.
Many students complain about grading on a curve since it’s possible for someone to get a lower grade with the curve than they would have gotten without the curve. This is especially concerning since one’s law school classmates are approximately as smart (LSAT) and dedicated (UGPA) as you are. Because of blind grading, trying to curry favor with your professors won’t change these facts.
What does this mean for you? It means that if you’re going to be at the top of the curve in a group of roughly equally qualified people, you’ve got to do more than at least some other people. But that doesn’t mean sucking up to the professor. It means working both harder and, most importantly, smarter than your classmates.
At the same time, curved grading and bling grading do not mean you should act like a jerk to your professor. You still want to make a good impression in general and, if you are interested in what the professor works on outside of class, then pursue that interest and talk to them about it. You never know what doors a professor can open up for you in the long run.
That is actually another benefit of blind grading: professors will have more credibility if they want to recommend and support students for admission to higher levels of education or for job and internship positions. A recommendation discussing a student’s excellent performance on exams has more credibility if those exams were blindly graded and curved for that matter.
So while you shouldn’t be dramatically nice to a professor to help your grades because of blind grading and curves, you still want to be a good student in any law school class. Blind grading isn’t the end of the world and in many ways, it rewards you for studying hard by making sure no one has an unfair advantage. If you did not get the grades you wanted your first semester of law school, remember that this is not undergrad, your classmates are very qualified, and you won’t really be able to tell what went wrong until you get some feedback. Blind grading and curved grading, for the most part, serve to reward you for studying hard and going the extra mile academically. Focus on yourself and your preparation, not the professor and not your classmates. The person who has the most say on your exam performance is YOU!
If you feel unprepared for an exam to the point where you are sucking up to the professor, read this post on how to avoid exam disaster when you haven’t studied enough. One bad exam experience will not define your entire law school career. For our tips on how to best recover from a bad exam experience, read this post. For more advice on how to bounce back from bad first semester grades, check out this post.
Blind grading and curved grading are just the beginning of new things you will have to deal with in law school. Be sure to check out our other content about things you will have to get used to when starting law school.
Looking for some help to do your best in law school? Find out about our law school tutoring options.
Leave a Reply