Clinical education is unlike any other experience GW offers.  Grading of clinical students should reflect this well-known fact.

As the Law School's website tells us, "Since 1971, the Jacob Burns Community Legal Clinics have provided members of the local community with critically needed legal services while giving motivated law students the opportunity to view the legal system up close and get experience  as counselors and advocates or people in need.  Closely supervised by faculty, students assist clients while learning about professional responsibility and honing their lawyering skills.

"The clinical programs vary considerably in purpose, duration, requirements, and duties, and every year special projects increase the scope of this rich offering.  Despite their diversity, all the Clinics share a common goal - to provide members of the community with critically needed legal services while giving motivated law students the opportunity to experience the practical application of law and to develop skills as negotiators, advocates, and litigators within an exciting and supportive educational environment."

As a collective unit, the set of 14 clinics is very different from any other course at GW.  As individual classes, each is unique compared to the rest - some are year-long, most are graded, but most importantly, the clientèle served, the types of cases dealt with by each, and each individual case in every clinic is unlike any other.  There's no "standard" caseload for student attorneys in the clinics, and whatever case is assigned, whether it involve two crucial legal questions or ten, requires dedicated research and zealous advocacy by the student or students assigned to handle it.  Despite these marked differences, the clinics are still tied to the standard grading curves that the Law School holds professors to in every other class.

To be sure, there are good reasons for curving grades as a general matter, even if we, as students, often dread the idea.  As at least one law professor here has said, "Life is graded on the curve."  All things being equal, no matter how well you do at something, if somebody does it better, they deserve recognition for their relative success.  It's a harsh reality, and one that the administration tries to explain in an effort to comfort 1Ls who are disappointed with their grades, but no matter how well the concept is understood as a matter of logic, it still can be devastating to find yourself on the down-slope of the bell.

But the curve nevertheless remains fairly simple to justify in classes with standardized finals, or even term papers that measure how well students understand and can apply a specific concept in a given course.  Multiple choice finals are usually the most clear-cut case, followed by essay finals and papers, each of which has some degree of necessary professorial subjectivity that is expected.  Still, grades in those classes are pretty one-dimensional, and are based on a standard set of assignments administered in a controlled environment.  The statistical principles that assume a naturally occurring distribution among a group of students unquestionably function more accurately in those scenarios than in courses that feature, or indeed are defined by a plethora of unpredictable variables.

Undoubtedly, clinical work represents a marked departure from the standard coursework paradigm, to the point that even the professors are titled differently than any other teacher at the law school - they are not "Professors of Law," but rather "Professors of Clinical Law."  The titular difference is also a substantive one that impacts how and what they teach, and how they interact with their students, and their clients.  There is no one-dimensional grading in clinics.  For most, the development of both written and oral advocacy skills is merely the beginning.  There's genuine issue-spotting and hours of research into questions of law that may or may not impact a given, arbitrarily assigned case.  There is interacting with clients, on the phone, through letters, and in-person (either at the clinic building, or, for at least two clinics, in jail).  There are both legal and administrative hurdles in every case that students are expected to recognize and navigate, and it does not take much to understand that each of these issues is different in every case.

So how should a professor of clinical law grade his or her students?  According to the Law School, the answer is "the same as in any other small course," i.e., half get the short end of the scale.

It is not that everybody who takes a clinic should automatically get an A.  That would be an untenable proposition, both in the sense of maintaining the integrity of the clinical programs, and out of fairness to those who choose not to take a clinic during their time at GW.  But, at the same time, subjecting clinical students to the same harsh, inflexible punitive curve that governs all other classes makes little sense.  There is no standard assignment in a clinic, no controlled environment.  There is only the client.  And giving a client the best representation possible should be duly rewarded by the school.

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