I do believe that for most lawyers trauma over law school grades lingers throughout life, and that the residual trauma probably explains why blog posts about law school grades get a surprisingly high number of "hits." But the PTSD topic of the day is not about trauma but about determination -- post-testing self-determination, if you will. In the wake of her appearance in a New York Times story about graduate school grades, Michigan's Senior Assistant Dean for Admissions Sarah Zearfoss had a smart post on law school grades in her blog A2Z. Among her many wise observations:
It’s not exactly a newsflash for lawyers and law students that BigLaw employers look at grades (in contrast, according to the article, to other graduate disciplines), and I actually think law students tend to put excessive emphasis on their role. Sometimes that means for jobs they had actually had a shot at; sometimes it means candidates don’t work on other key aspects of their professional development, erroneously assuming that a good GPA is going to do all the heavy lifting. Either way, it’s self-defeating. High grades are simply not always a necessary, and never a sufficient, existing condition to getting a law job.
