Top Law Schools

Some professors have such grading policy that they can adjust your grade up or down 1/3 tic based on your class participation.
My question is: how much is too much weight for grading 1L class participation in general?
Can professor say that 30% of your final grade will be class participation? How about 20% or 10%?

It's best to raise your hand at every opportunity just to be safe.

Yeah just participate. I had a 1l professor who could increase or decrease your grade by .3 if she wanted (and she did, often).

No one actually assigns a percentage to class participation like that.

I'm actually surprised to hear about a professor who takes advantage of their ability to adjust grades based on participation. Almost all of my teachers said that they could do it, but that they were very much not inclined to, because raising someone's grade almost always means that someone else will get bumped down unfairly. Adjusting grades down for participation is pretty much unheard of. You can get adjusted down for not attending class or for very obviously not preparing. But you will not get adjusted down for not raising your hand enough.

cavalier1138 wrote:No one actually assigns a percentage to class participation like that.

I'm actually surprised to hear about a professor who takes advantage of their ability to adjust grades based on participation. Almost all of my teachers said that they could do it, but that they were very much not inclined to, because raising someone's grade almost always means that someone else will get bumped down unfairly. Adjusting grades down for participation is pretty much unheard of. You can get adjusted down for not attending class or for very obviously not preparing. But you will not get adjusted down for not raising your hand enough.

This sounds correct to me, although 1L grading is such a black box that it's really difficult to tell the degree to which any given professor takes participation/attendance into account.

My advice would be that if a professor says that she factors in participation, try to show up to class and not be caught totally unprepared when called on, but don't stress about it more than that.

asdf2017 wrote:Some professors have such grading policy that they can adjust your grade up or down 1/3 tic based on your class participation.
My question is: how much is too much weight for grading 1L class participation in general?
Can professor say that 30% of your final grade will be class participation? How about 20% or 10%?

This sounds pretty professor (and therefore school) specific; if tenured and even if not, professors can do whatever they want with grades. I'd ask students who had the professor before.

This almost sounds like a new professor asking the question, based on the wording

Best policy I think is to say class participation may be taken into account at the margins, but without any numerical aspect attached

So long and thanks for all the fish. If you decide you've had enough of the post-apocalyptic wasteland, feel free to join me over at TLS - with 100% fewer Lawcrossing articles.