Law student grade appeal appeal plan rejected

The Law School faculty voted on Monday to reject a procedure for appealing grades that had been proposed by the school's student government. Gary Clinton, assistant dean for student affairs, said the student proposal -- which would have forced the faculty to hold a hearing within 30 days after a student submitted a written complaint to appeal a grade -- was "too formalistic." "There was concern over the rigid time frame," Clinton said. Another reason for rejecting the students' proposal was its limit on what types of grades could be appealed. According to the Council of Student Representatives proposal, a student could appeal only a failing grade, not a low passing grade. Clinton said that most of the students who had appealed grades in the past few years appealed low grades -- not failing grades -- which they felt they did not deserve. "The concern that I had was that the [student proposal] is a proposal that excludes virtually all of the cases that have come before us in the past," he said. The faculty also rejected the students' request that appeal cases be dealt with the Committee on Academic Standing, which now deals only with student academic issues such as eligibility to continue in the Law School. It moved instead to have the cases heard by the Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility, which oversees faculty issues such as accusations of faculty plagiarism. Clinton said the faculty recognized that "students were trying to keep grade-grubbing to a minimum," but added that they "were doing that by having a very hard-nosed policy." CSR president Mike Farber said that "the proposal that was adopted was largely the faculty's proposal with two amendments." Clinton said that one of the major "modifications" to the faculty's proposal was that it clarified that a student may submit either a written or an oral complaint when appealing a grade. Still, despite changes to the faculty proposal, Farber said that student representatives to CSR were "a bit disappointed because our proposal wasn't adopted." While Farber said that he thinks it is "good to have some sort of procedure," he said he is still concerned about "the lack of exact procedure."