Should You Brag About Your Law School Grades On Facebook?
from the depends-on-your-goals dept
In a way, I’m surprised we don’t have more stories about people posting their grades on social media sites. The kids are already using Facebook and Twitter as a running diary of their lives, so you’d expect there to be more instances where people throw their law school transcripts up on the internet.
In fact, let me ask the question this way: why wouldn’t you post your grades on Facebook? They’re clearly important to you. If you did well, you can brag about them just as surely as one of your friends is bragging about the exploits of their kids or dogs. If you did poorly, you can seek the solace of friends who you don’t actually like well enough to have a beer with. Why wouldn’t you post them?
The obvious answers seem painfully old-timey. “It’s in poor taste to brag about your grades.” “Your transcript should be private.” “You got an ‘A’? Go f*** yourself.” These are the thoughts of a previous generation. For the Facebook generation… I mean, have you seen what people post? This is nothing.
A law student decided to post his solid grades on Facebook. I bet you can guess what school we’re talking about. Let’s just say that it’s a school that seems to admit students who like to draw attention to themselves when things are going well by subtly upturning their collars….
Yeah, we’re talking about UVA Law because that’s where this kind of thing is most likely to happen. A law student there posted his recent grades on his Facebook page. Here was the initial post sent to us by a tipster:
A few things jump out from this posting:
- Thank you for your service.
- It’s not really “bragging” if you got Bs.
- He’s only a first year.
Look, if I saw this from one of my Facebook friends, I’d simply respond like this and move on:
But other people at UVA Law were annoyed by this perceived display of self-aggrandizement. That inspired our guy to make a follow up Facebook post:
“Deprive non-law school friend of updates about my life” is the new killing it.
Again, this wouldn’t be something I would do, but this is how people use social media. It’s UVA! I bet this isn’t even the most “look at how special I am” Facebook post by a UVA Law student since I started writing this story. I reached out to the guy (via Facebook) who posted his grades, but he has not yet responded. I assume he’s somewhere trying to figure out why so many people care that he posted his grades on Facebook while simultaneously firm in his belief that his 1L grades were an appropriate starting point for a public Facebook discussion. It’s the world we live in.
In the battle between propriety and Facebook, Facebook wins. Facebook won. People better get used to seeing this kind of thing, at least from 1Ls who don’t yet know any better.
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Seems to me I've heard of clients suing their lawyers for substandard defenses. Ones where the barrister should have/could have put up a much stronger defense or the quality of that defense left a lot to be desired.
Setting up these figures into a sort of public record with Facebooks' known habit of invading what would normally be info you wouldn't obtain easily, seems to me to be setting up the first step later in life of being able to have a case on just such a substandard theme. All it takes is the loss of a case, whether the merits were for or against. It's not the if such a case has merit, it's that you've just provided the evidence that no matter what level of defense standard you've put up, it's not as high as it should have been.
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Grades per se tell you nothing much
I have worked with those who have been academically superior to me (and they were really good) but they had their blind spots and in various cases couldn't see outside the box. They hadn't been taught the necessary techniques. So a less academic person who had been taught the techniques was able to show them a better way. In some cases, they took off with it. In other cases they didn't.
Just because this young one hasn't aced it in every class, this doesn't mean he has less ability than someone who has. It depends on a lot of other factors, including how they cope in exams and how well they can regurgitate the specific information they have been taught.
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Re: Grades per se tell you nothing much
I still have trouble believing how many people seem to think that A = good at your job.
Colleges and universities, with their focus on multiple choice questions (with a very few research or discussion papers here and there), don't ask students to understand what it is they're studying, rather they ask them to memorize and learn material by heart. The majority of students who have A's are just good at memorizing textbooks but they tend not to be very skilled when it comes to applying their knowledge to practical situations.
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This is news?
1. Somebody posted marginally personal information on Facebook.
2. Somebody thought it was a big enough controversy to write 500 words about it.
3. I took time out of my precious web browsing time to critique the critique.
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Re: This is news?
Where's the dirt?
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Re: Re: This is news?
That's exactly what I was thinking. Then I got to the end and the whole article is about someone posting something completely innocuous on Facebook.
Um, okay. What about the trillion other boring posts by random people on Facebook?
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hmmm
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Re: hmmm
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Why not?
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Prospective clients
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He got one comment. It was me grounding him for not getting a 4.0 :)
Given the quality of a lot of the crap I see on FB, somebody mentioning they killed it in school that semester seems like a non-issue. Hell, out local paper calls out local kids that make Dean's List or Honors or whatever it may be called at their school.
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Modern Creative Law
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Law School
I like to take a few minutes every day to take my mind off of whatever it is I am relearning at the time so I don't go crazy (I'm looking at you, Property) and saw this post.
I wasn't the top of my class. I was happy to be in the middle. However, grading is different depending on the school. Some give out A's through F's, and some are strictly on a point scale. Additionally, grades are given out differently. This guy got a B in torts and an A- in Crim Law. Good for him. Compared to the students at his school, he did pretty good.
To contrast, I mentioned that I just graduated. To graduate with honors, you need a cumulative GPA of a 2.8. A 2.8! The valedictorian last year had a 3.4. Compared to my school this guy would crush it. Or would he? Unless grading is standardized across schools (not the case for law schools) it is completely subjective.
Additionally, with our honors cut at 2.8, our Bar pass rate this past July was 78%, and last February was 92%. The State average hovers around 65%. What does that say? Grading scales are subjective.
I heard a funny anecdote a while back, and have learned it rings true: A students are research attorneys, B students are their assistants, and C students are trial attorneys.
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Easy, let's standardize tests at law schools so that when someone posts their grades on fb we can compare them apples to apples.
We can call it --- No Lawyer Left Behind
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Sharing life situations is exactly what Facebook's own marketing machine emphasizes the service is for. While others have the free will to criticize, their opinion shouldn't force people who choose to share with friends and family in that venue to curtail such sharing.
Instead, the critic might be wise to instead grow up and let people say what they want about their own lives on their own social timelines, lest one day they themselves say something innocently only to be blasted and ridiculed ceaselessly without having all the facts, let alone knowing the state of mind of the poster.
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Bragging about law school grades
Why? Easy - I didn't have a sugar daddy, or some sort of "cushion" to help me. Working 50 hours a week (and going to night school), helping with the three kids, because "that's what Dads do", long commute - hey, you want dedicated, diligent, capable, or you want someone who goes to school because Daddy wants that and there is nothing else to do.
Well, one semester, after the Dean threatened to expel me for poor grades, I was near the top, and made the highest grades in contracts ever - held the record for six years - but it was a severe strain for my wife, and after that, being a husband and Dad was more important, so ....
I think, other than the initial hire, judging by grades is normally just finding out who had the way "greased" for them. "Every thing should be as simple as possible, but no simpler" - Einstein. Grades are too simple an evaluation.
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Re: Bragging about law school grades
I think it says more that we could handle it and finish than not having responsibilities and getting high grades....
/Humble brag
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