Spring 2020 Grading

April 3, 2020

Dear College of Law Students,

I am writing to let you know that the faculty has decided to adjust our normal grading procedures in light of the significant disruption being caused nationwide and in our community by the COVID-19 virus. We absolutely understand and empathize with the challenges you are facing right now, including worrying about your own health and the wellbeing of family and friends, actively parenting children who are home from school, and the uncertainty of future employment. The College’s faculty and staff are facing many of those difficulties as well, and we appreciate the impact of this crisis on you and your ability to prepare for and perform on final examinations.

Accordingly, for the Spring 2020 semester, the College will award Pass/No Pass (P/NP) grades as follows:

1. For 1Ls, this P/NP policy will be mandatory.
2. For 2L, 3L, and LL.M. students, this P/NP policy will be the default. After these students receive notice of their grades under the 9-point system, they may elect to receive those traditional grades in all of their classes instead of a Pass or No Pass for their classes. This choice will apply for all courses governed by the policy. Students will not be allowed to choose course by course.
3. Finally, all clinical courses will be graded under the traditional 9-point grading system.

There are some other nuances, which I explain in more detail in the attached FAQ that will be continually updated on our website as we receive more questions.

This memo is lengthy because I want to describe to you how the Law Faculty came to this conclusion and also to fully explain the policy. 

The College of Law Faculty Rules require all courses to have a grade using a unique 9-point grading scale not found in the rest of the University.

We spent two weeks discussing a variety of responses to the disruption caused by the coronavirus, including whether to maintain our current system. During those two weeks, over 118 law schools across the country made some change to their grading system. In a recent survey, only 5 of 123 law schools did not alter their grading in some way. At least 83 of the Top 100 law schools switched to some form of Pass/Fail, with the lion’s share selecting Pass/Fail with no opportunity to select grades. Others are still deciding.

Meanwhile, we received three student petitions about this issue. Over 25% of our students signed a petition requesting a Pass/Fail grading system with no opportunity to select grades. Another 16 students signed a petition requesting a Pass/Fail system that allowed grade selection, while still another 13 asked the faculty to keep the status quo. A survey conducted by the Student Bar Association found roughly ½ of the 100 students surveyed wanted a no-grade P/F system and 23% wanted a system that allowed grade choice. The Law Faculty considered seriously all of the petitions and communications from students about their desired outcome, and we were uniformly impressed with the professionalism, thoughtfulness, and analyses of student requests.

I formed a committee to explore various grading options and present a background memo to the faculty. After initial discussions among the faculty on those options, I formed a second committee to recommend a variety of ways to administratively implement any move to P/NP grading. After four hours of meetings and consideration of all of this work product, the faculty voted to implement the grading system set forth above for the Spring 2020 semester.

The Law Faculty adopted this grading system because we collectively believe that it provides the best balance of competing concerns and addresses the very real need of Nebraska law students in this environment. I should say up front that we recognize that our solution is not perfect – no solution would be in this environment. Each of the student petitions presented to the faculty, as well as each of the various systems being implemented in law schools across the country, have benefits and drawbacks that must be balanced. A solution that may work well for other law schools may have significant drawbacks at Nebraska, and vice versa. To complicate matters, the benefits and drawbacks of various systems will be different depending on each student’s individual circumstances.

Thus, we announce this policy knowing that no matter what we chose to do, some would benefit and others would not; some would be relieved and others upset; some would be motivated and others discouraged. Also, while we necessarily tried to anticipate what the future may hold for our community and for each of you, we cannot anticipate the next iteration of this ever-evolving crisis and its impact on our plans. When deciding among many unknowns, we tried to err on the side of helping those students who may be seriously impacted by this crisis.

Two primary concerns drove our decision making. First, we prioritized students and our compassion towards your experiences. Specifically, we heavily weighed how this unprecedented crisis might impact both your ability to be successful and our faculty’s ability to appropriately evaluate our students’ success in understanding the semester’s course materials. Second, we strongly considered the practical consequences of our decision on your ability to demonstrate success in law school and on your future career opportunities.

1. Students First: As we all know, you are facing an unprecedented crisis that will impact you in numerous ways, large and small, known and unknowable. Most immediately, you are rightly concerned about your own health and the health of family and friends. Additionally, though, you are adults with numerous responsibilities and concerns that are different than undergraduates. Many of you have children who are home from day care or public schools, which impacts your ability to concentrate and study. Many of you were laid off from jobs that helped pay your rent. You have spouses, partners, and roommates whose jobs have been impacted as well.

You are now being asked to learn in a way that differs remarkably from how you have been learning for the entirety of your law school career. Whether viewing your professor through a series of writings or a recorded lecture or live through the window of your computer screen, you are not in an environment with which you are familiar. You have little time to acclimate yourself to this new study context before you take significant cumulative exams, many of which constitute your entire grade for the semester and, in some instances, nearly all of your grade for the year.

All of these concerns convinced the Law Faculty that for many of you any grades you received at the end of the semester would not accurately reflect your abilities or effort. Moreover, because much of law grading is on a curve, and therefore relative, grades had a high chance of reflecting the extent to which students in a particular class were distracted by this crisis rather than reflecting the students’ fulfillment of our learning objectives.

Further, grades in many law school classes are determined on a single exam at the end of the semester. Thus, the disruption caused by COVID-19 is happening during the exact moment when you are preparing for exams—a critical learning period for many. In addition, many predict that this virus will reach its peak in Nebraska during late April, right before exams.

Finally, because you must still pass a bar exam at the end of your educational career, the Law Faculty felt that you would still be motivated to study even under a Pass/No Pass system. You are studying to become part of a profession and the skills and knowledge you are learning are crucial for your professional success, with or without a grade attached to a course. We know and trust you, and we believe your intrinsic motivation will sustain you during these last few weeks of the semester.

In short, we believe a Pass/No Pass system provides relief to those of you who are impacted by COVID-19 in ways large and small and we do not think using this system for one semester will have a long-term impact on your careers, goals, and dreams.

2. Demonstrating Success: Although we implemented a Pass/No Pass grading system across the board for Spring 2020 classes, we decided to permit upper-class and LL.M. students the option to choose our normal grades instead of P/NP grade. This option recognizes the practical reality that some of these students may need to demonstrate to future employers how they performed in law school, even under these unprecedented conditions. Many of these students, unlike those in the first year, will have little additional course work to demonstrate their talents. First-year students will have two full years of classes remaining. Some subset of employers will only hire graduates of Nebraska Law who achieve certain grades, and we did not feel like we should take away the opportunity of students to demonstrate excellent results and remain competitive for jobs all over the country. Additionally, the Law Faculty believed, regardless of employer reaction, that the College should recognize and encourage students who are able to perform well academically this semester.

Of course, first-year students have these concerns as well. However, the Law Faculty determined that the first-year experience and curriculum were so different than the upper-class experience and curriculum that we could not treat them in precisely the same way. We recognize that there is some cost to not allowing 1L students to select grades, but we concluded we could not avoid these costs without doing more harm than good.

First, requiring 1Ls to choose grades would be very difficult in this context. A variety of questions would be presented in making such a choice, such as the following: “Do these grades reflect my abilities, or are they flawed by what has transpired?” “Will employers view my Pass as a bad grade and, how bad might they think it is?” “What are other students doing—if people are taking grades of “5”, will employers see my Pass and assume that it was less than a 5?” Unlike an upper-class student with dozens of grades as a reference point, the 1L student would have very little ability or information to make that judgment. Given the inability to answer these questions and the uncertainty associated with what a Pass would mean to the outside world when it dominates some 1L transcripts and not others, we decided that we could eliminate some of that difficulty by placing “Pass” or “No Pass” on all transcripts for 1L students.

Second, the impact of a Pass/No Pass system on job prospects for 1Ls is much less than for upper-class students. Firms that care about grades have already made offers to 1Ls for jobs this summer. We think Fall 2020 grades will better reflect a 1L’s ability than grades awarded at the end of this semester. Accordingly, we plan on moving fall on-campus interviews to January and February so that firms who hire for the summer of 2021 will have Fall 2020 grades with which to evaluate applicants.

Third, we think the coursework and preparation in the 2L and 3L years are materially different than the 1L curriculum. While the 1L experience is one of developing the ability to do sophisticated legal analysis with a limited amount of doctrinal knowledge, the 2L and 3L experience is more focused on expanding the students' familiarity with legal rules, institutions, and policy tensions, as well as developing practical skills. Upper-class students are building on a foundation they have already made, whereas 1Ls are building their foundation right now. This crisis is disrupting everyone’s work; however, we believe the disruption will have a disproportionate impact on 1Ls because of the type of learning they are doing at this stage of their legal education. 

Fourth, grading 1L classes necessarily involves differentiation in relative terms more so than with upper-class courses, which are not under a predetermined grading curve. With such large classes and the prospect of significant numbers of students being affected by recent events, we are not confident that the grades that emerge will accurately measure what we hope our grades measure. In 2L and 3L courses, however, grades are often determined in a less relative fashion, with professors making grading judgments differently. In those courses, it is easier for professors to accommodate disruption in their exam design and grading than it is in the 1L setting. In addition, the volume of credits involved magnifies the significance of any measurement inaccuracies in our grading. With 25 or so credits on the line for 1L students (because of year-long courses), relative grading inaccuracies are more significant than they are for 2L and 3L students who may have 12-18 credits on the line from just this spring semester.

Thus, the policy of having a Pass/No Pass grading system stems from our understanding of the immediate impact of this crisis on you and our belief that this impact will prevent us from accurately assessing, in a nuanced way, your relative success in learning and understanding the material from your courses this year. The policy of allowing upper-class and LL.M. students to choose to have grades reflects our view that, although we know the disruption will still impact many of these students, grades are somewhat less likely to be inaccurate in upper-class and LL.M. courses. The impact of this disruption is lessened because of these students’ experience with legal study, differences in their curriculum vis-à-vis the 1L curriculum, and the diminished role of relative performance in upper-class and LL.M. grading.

As I mentioned in the beginning, this policy is not perfect. I do think reasonable minds can disagree on the “right” solution (indeed the faculty had four hours of meetings about these issues because they are hard), but we hope you will respect the process we used to arrive at this result as well as our emphasis on the student-experience, both throughout this crisis and when it is over. We think this solution will help you succeed right now and also will not hinder your ability to succeed when the crisis passes.

I have attached a FAQ that answers some of the most immediate questions I imagine you will have. This FAQ also will be posted to our website. Please send me other questions by email and we will add to the FAQ as necessary. If you have other questions or thoughts you want to share, I also have scheduled a student town hall for Tuesday, April 7 at noon on Zoom. You will receive an invitation through email with the specific Zoom address.

Finally, please know that above all else, the College of Law faculty, administration, and staff are focused on helping you continue to achieve your goals despite the disruption caused by COVID-19.

Please take good care and stay well.

Kind regards, 

Richard Moberly
Dean
University of Nebraska College of Law