want better leaders? start by changing the law school grading curve.

One of these days–not today, but some other day–I’m going to write an essay about how lawyers are the reason the United States can’t have nice things, and how the only way to fix that problem is to reform legal education. Today, though, I’m just going to share this meme I made that’s having a viral moment over in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.

My lowkey viral mandatory mean meme.

If you haven’t been to law school, you’re probably unaware of the terrible way we train lawyers. It’s terrible in a lot of ways, but my meme reflects just one of them: Most U.S. law schools use a grading curve system known as “mandatory mean.” A mandatory mean requires that the average final grade across all students in a particular class be set at a specific level. At Emory Law, the mandatory mean is a B+, so when a professor is assigning grades to students at the end of the semester, the average class grade must sit at a B+. In other words, half the class must receive a B+ or higher and half the class must receive a B+ or lower.

Outside of law school, “grading on a curve” is usually seen as a good thing because the highest score in the class gets an A and everyone else is adjusted upward accordingly. A curve with a mandatory mean, however, hurts as often as it helps. If, theoretically, every single person in a class with Emory Law’s B+ mandatory mean got 100% in the class, every single person would receive a B+ for their perfect score.

The mandatory mean clause in Emory Law’s student handbook. The B+ mandatory mean applies to every class a first-year student is required to take, and to most upper-level classes as well.

In practice, the effect of the mandatory mean is this: I know that my grade in the class is not just dependent on how well I master the material, but also on how well everyone else masters the material. Or more precisely, thanks to the “if everyone does well we all get a B+” phenomenon, my grade is dependent on you not mastering the material as well as I do. We can’t all master the material or nobody gets an A and all our cumulative GPAs suffer. Because legal employers rely heavily on GPA when making hiring decisions, the entire future of my legal career might hinge on making sure you do worse in a class than I do.

This artificial scarcity of grades creates and incentivizes competition where none need exist. It discourages students from helping each other learn, because the more students who learn, the more everyone’s GPA suffers. Law school is hard and stressful enough as it is, and the mandatory mean system encourages everyone to stress & study in isolation, disconnected from classmates whose mastery of the law threatens each others’ future job prospects.

Most of the memes in the Law School Memes for Edgy T14s Facebook group are about how absolutely awful law school is.

The worst part? Implementing a system that punishes all students if every student does well is proof that the goal of a law school is not to train as many good lawyers as possible. The goal of a law school with a mandatory mean is to rank students against each other. We’re not even trying to teach every student well enough to earn an A; right from the beginning, we’ve written off half the student body as sub-B+ students no matter what, and eliminated any incentive to bring the sub-B+ students up to an A level.

Is that really what we want to teach law students? That success is a limited resource that should be hoarded by the people at the “top”? That working & learning as a team results in a worse outcome for all? That the only way one person can win is to make sure everyone else loses? 

Law students go on to become lawyers who go on to become SCOTUS justices and members of Congress and presidents of the United States. The next time you’re feeling infuriated by the miserable state of U.S. leaders, rest assured that the system is working perfectly. All those former law students are behaving exactly as law school trained them.

Memes about talking people out of going to law school are popular in the Law School Memes for Edgy T14s Facebook group, and for good reason.