It is perhaps ironic that everyone loves to tout a Harvard or Yale Law Degree as something almost holy and miles above every other law school graduate, but the fact of the matter is, it is quite impossible to ever really determine how competent those ivy leaguers are since they no longer give out actual letter grades. Instead, students are graded on a system of either Honors, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail, and according to Business Insider, virtually no one ever fails, and very few every get stamped with a Low Pass mark.
Yale Law School is widely regarded as the top law school in the U.S.
The school doesn’t have regular grades, just Honors, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail. Almost no one fails, so basically the worst you can do is get a low pass.
Not only does Yale Law have a different grading structure, but it has a unique culture as well. - Business Insider
Additionally, many academics at these law schools hardly even appear to care if their students show up to class, or are prepared for exams. And a great example of this is former President Bill Clinton, who chose to go to Yale for just these reasons and spent barely 25% of his time actually in school.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Yale’s heterodox style was what attracted Clinton in the first place. As biographer David Maraniss has observed, Clinton hewed to two criteria in selecting a law school: that it be prestigious, and that it let him get a jump on his political career. “Nowhere could this be done more surely than at Yale,” writes Maraniss. Clinton spent his first two-and-a-half months in law school more or less out of law school, working as an operative for a liberal U.S. Senate candidate. When the campaign ended, he threw himself at the mercy of the first sympathetic classmate he could find, a woman named Nancy Bekavac. Maraniss recounts the exchange:
“Hi, I’m Bill Clinton. Can I borrow your notes?”
“For what?”
“For everything.”
“Are you in our class?
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, where the hell’ve you been? We’ve been here since September!”
Bekavac soon relented—partly because of Clinton’s charm, partly because Clinton was hardly unique. One classmate spent all three years working full-time for the mayor’s office in New York City. Another was so burnt out by political work when he got to Yale that it was a year and a half before he showed up to class. - New Republic
Sadly, if you begin to measure the time when American students began to digress in global rankings for curriculum such as math, reading, writing, and overall literacy, it can be tied to this very period when those who would become our teachers of the last 40 years protested at universities to have grading systems changed to pass/fail parameters instead of a grading system that better showed their competency when they were ready to go out into the world.
Fast forward to 2016…
As we know, history is said to both repeat itself in a rhyming fashion, and what was good enough for the baby boomers appears to be just what the millennials want for themselves. As at a college Midwestern liberal arts college in the state of Ohio, 1300 students are demanding that letter grades be abolished from the university grading system, and that only pass/fail grades be given so that they could have time to skip classes and engage in the pastime of protesting.
Students at Oberlin College are asking the school to put academics on the back burner so they can better turn their attention to activism. More than 1,300 students at the Midwestern liberal arts college have now signed a petition asking that the college get rid of any grade below a C for the semester, and some students are requesting alternatives to the standard written midterm examination, such as a conversation with a professor in lieu of an essay.
The students say that between their activism work and their heavy course load, finding success within the usual grading parameters is increasingly difficult. “A lot of us worked alongside community members in Cleveland who were protesting,” Megan Bautista, a co-liaison in Oberlin’s student government, said, referring to the protests surrounding the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a police officer in 2014. “But we needed to organize on campus as well — it wasn’t sustainable to keep driving 40 minutes away. A lot of us started suffering academically.” - The Week
It is no wonder that America as a whole… intellectually, spiritually, morally, and productively is on a dangerous decline, and the outlook for the nation’s future looks more bleak everyday. And following a generation where the country was led by the very same people who elicited the drug culture, the counter-culture, and the gay rights movement, their grandchildren are now seeking to spiral America into even greater depths as their applications of political correctness, safe spaces, and never being allowed to fail will eventually put the final nail in the coffin of the once greatest nation in history.
Kenneth Schortgen Jr is a writer for Secretsofthefed.com, Examiner.com,Roguemoney.net, and To the Death Media, and hosts the popular web blog, The Daily Economist. Ken can also be heard Wednesday afternoons giving an weekly economic report on the Angel Clark radio show.
