The first year of law school is famously tough. Those nine vicious months are so infamous that when we tell family and friends of our plans to enroll, we are met with looks of "Oh dear Hashem" and tongue-in cheek gift-wrapped copies of Turrow's tale of torture. This year, the class of 2011 was met with a new invidious addition to the turbulence of 1L-dom: a graded Legal Research and Writing program. Ushered in by an administration eager to emulate higher ranked schools, this marks a departure from the High Pass, Pass, Low Pass, Fail system of yesteryear that served as small but welcome relief when trying to learn how to write in legalese.

LRW is a two-unit class as opposed to the three and four unit behemoths of 1L year like Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law. However, ask anyone who's been through it-graded or for credit only-and they will tell you that LRW is the most stress-inducing and time consuming class. This is one of the arguments proponents of the new graded system use. They say that since the students are doing so much work anyway, they should benefit by having their efforts graded and weighed into their GPAs. This argument overlooks that many if not most students say that having LRW on a pass/fail system tempers some of the stress it causes. Furthermore, this pro-grading argument seems doubly flawed if the class remains worth a measly two units. If the administration is set on adding to the stress of 1L year by factoring LRW into first years' grades, the least they could do is to make the weight given to the grades match the effort put into the class.

These concerns and others might have been brought before the administration last year had the SBA had a chance to have its voice heard before the new graded program was voted in. Instead, the SBA was given very little heads up and as a result drafted a less than effective letter expressing apprehensions from the students' perspectives. That many of the concerns came to fruition became apparent at a meeting held in the Senate last semester as a sort of check-up on the progress of the new program. At this meeting, the 1L senators were very influential and helpful at bringing in the specific problems their constituents faced.

At the meeting, the 1L senators enumerated three main areas that the majority of their classmates' complaints fit into: inconsistency among adjunct professors, adjuncts' accessibility and feedback under the new blind grading system, and the effectiveness of teaching across the board. Under the first category of complaints, students criticized the inadequate communication between dean's fellows and their adjuncts and a lack of proper explanation of assignments. The third complaint referenced dissatisfaction with classes in which adjuncts read straight from power points and without ever articulating concrete course goals. This paired with a longstanding problem at the law school-that the writing center writing fellows are inconsistent-manifested a huge amount of frustration for 1Ls.

The second category of complaints-those regarding feedback and blind grading-is perhaps the most complicated and anger-provoking among first-years. The problem is how to implement a blind grading system in a class of twelve while still offering feedback on assignments before they're due, and then how do you curve small sections fairly against one another. There are forty-five LRW sections all being curved against each other without anyone reading every single memo. This yielded distrust last semester that grades would be distributed to accurately reflect students' work. Deans Fellow Arsenio Roderiguez says he was impressed however, with how evenly dispersed the grades came out. He says that even the multiple choice online exam yielded a perfect bell curve and that only a handful of students' grades had to be reexamined by Professor Clark, who is the Associate Professor of the LRW Program, before being finalized and submitted.

This success may assuage some fears that the grading system would be completely unfair, but students are likely to remain unhappy unless the issue of feedback is resolved. Deans Fellows and 1Ls report miscommunications between Professor Clark and the adjuncts about whether they were allowed to give feedback, given that the grading is supposed to blind. The concern is that adjuncts would recognize the work of students whose memos they read and commented on and that this would affect their final grading and dismantle the idea of a blind grading system.

In response to the Senate meeting, SBA President Brett Sheats met with Professor Clark and she addressed this issue among others. She assured Sheats that adjuncts were allowed to give feedback and that she would work to improve communication within the program. Sheats says he was pleased with Professor Clark's receptiveness to our complaints, but was disappointed that he had been unable to elicit much in the way of constructive criticism from the Deans Fellows and adjunct professors, to whom he had appealed before the meeting. Because of this dearth of input, Sheats fears that he was unable to bring all of the issues that need resolving to Professor Clark's attention, and he also fears that without everyone involved in the program working towards solutions, nothing will be resolved. He is persisting on however, planning a meeting with Dean Morrison this very week and is drafting a letter to the 1L class to keep them informed.

Implementing the new grading policy met with some unexpected logistical issues that probably hindered its success. Namely, Professors DeSanctis and Murray both left George Washington to pursue other projects, leaving the large task of overhauling and overseeing the LRW program in the hands of Professor Clark-who is only in her second year here. It took three professors to run the established and ungraded LRW program, so it was perhaps hasty to think a new and more complicated system should be left in the hands of one new professor.

One Dean's Fellow who wishes to remain anonymous suggests that because the law school suddenly found itself without a sufficient number of faculty members, they would have been better off postponing the program or using this year as a test year. For instance, the school could have started grading everything and trying to curve across the sections, but in the end just used those grades to correspond to low pass, pass and high pass designations. This way the kinks could have been hammered out without treating this year's 1Ls like guinea pigs in a flawed experiment.

The administration was mainly taking cues from top tier law schools that grade their LRW, probably in an attempt to improve our placement the perpetual rankings race. But the ineffectual and unfair implementation of this new system could have the opposite effect. With an unhappy 1L class that doesn't feel it is learning legal writing but does feel shafted by the administration, our rankings could slip. There isn't much in law school more important that learning to write like an attorney, and if word gets out that we aren't teaching our students to do that, the US World Report is unlikely to be kind. Still, things appear to be improving. 1L Section 12 Senator Navdeep Singh says, "Students appreciate the program's attempt to provide corrective oversight, provide consistent guidance to the adjuncts and Dean's Fellows, and provide a clear statement about the grading policy. The Program has been very responsive to the concerns expressed and is taking real steps to ensure that LRW is a good educational experience."