Stanford Law School faculty voted last week to drop the school’s letter grade system in favor of an honors, pass, restricted credit or no credit system. Stanford will join Yale and Berkeley, among other law schools, in eschewing traditional letter grades.

The move was made to decrease excessive competition among law students, a source of significant stress.

“One of the things we are trying to encourage is [that] students shouldn’t try to distinguish themselves for no good reason at all,” Dean Larry Kramer told The Daily. “There’s incredible demand for law students in the job market.”

“The reform will have significant pedagogical benefits, including that it encourages greater flexibility and innovation in the classroom and in designing metrics for evaluating student work,” Kramer wrote in an email to law students.

Eliminating letter grades may also stop law students from structuring their course schedules to boost GPAs.

In the letter grade system, core doctrinal courses are usually taught “on-mean” and curved based on a mean score, while most seminars are taught “off-mean.” Students seeking summer associate positions could artificially boost their GPAs by putting off the doctrinal classes until the third year and taking more “off-mean” courses earlier on.

“I am glad that the new grading system will eliminate this ‘on-mean’ and ‘off-mean’ system so that students can feel free to take whatever classes they are interested in,” said Amanda Bonn J.D. ‘09.

The jury is still out on whether or not the new grading system will help or hinder law students in their search for clerkships and jobs.

Without letter grades, law students won’t be able to cite their GPAs to distinguish themselves from other applicants. To that end, the law school will offer other ways to showcase high achievement.

“We will probably increase the number of prizes and awards that are available,” Kramer said. “We’ve taken away competing for grades just to separate yourself from other students for no good reasons, but we still will give students who care about certain things opportunities.”

High demand for law school graduates in the job market may ensure that the new grading system won’t have a negative effect on Stanford law students.

“The students competing for the most competitive clerkships will likely have to distinguish themselves in other ways, e.g., positions on law review, but they tend to do so anyway,” Bonn said. “For everyone else, the new grading system will probably enable more students to be competitive in the clerkship process as, once again, grades won’t distinguish so minutely between the bulk of the class.”

Kramer was ultimately satisfied with his conclusion that letter grades no longer provided benefits to the law school and that the time was right to move on.

“This really was about recognizing that we could improve the internal culture and that it was ok to make the move,” he said.