After toilsome hours of compulsively hitting "reload" on the appropriate page in the dire hope and fervant fear that grades for winter quarter migh actually be posted in a timely manner, I have come to an end of that journey. It was a nice substitute for chewing on my lip and picking at my cuticles - generally less potential for turning bloody (unless, say the concentrated frustration at the interminable unknowns finally geysered to the surface in a public area), but all good things must pass.The grades, as they often do, trickled onto my transcript as if laboriously eeking past Academic Services' englarged prostate. I really do believe that UW should consider selling add space on the grades page, because I guarantee that we - as rabid law students - load and reload that stupid page about a thousand times each quarter.
I've decided academic services actually just randomly decides what each student's GPA allocation is going to be and then makes it look like it reflects the classes a student took. Or at least I think almost every quarter I've ended up with "two A's, a B+, and one CR (which looks terrifyingly like a C when you are paranoid about the test you bombed and anxiously reloading the grades page because there's an off chance that academic services actually does enforce their pretend grade deadling, but actually means it was a credit/no-credit class and I in fact recieved credit for it)" regardless of my academic confidence or lack thereof for any of the A or B+ classes. I've heard other students mention the "no matter how hard or unhard I work, I always end up with the exact same grades" phenomenon before, so I am not alone in this. It favors me a little bit, so I do not complain. Ok, actually in my first year there were no "CR" classes so I got another A or A-, so maybe the real requisite is that I have to get one B+ and two A's.
Which was a roundabout way of saying that I got an A in my Law and Medicine seminar (huge win), an A in Medical Malpractice (unbelievably exciting as the competition in that class was INSANELY qualified and LLM intensive), CR for my meditation clinic, and a satisfyingly arbitrary and capricious B+ for the cruel and unusual punishment that was criminal procedure.
I feel that it does not necessarily say superlative things about a class that a student who wrote a four hour treatise on *the wrong issue* for her final and only exam in that class (and make no mistake, it was the wrong issue) came out with a B+ due to the good graces of the curved grading system. I'm just saying....
At any rate, I guess there is relief. I did bomb that test, so I would like to thank the many students who joined me in that endeavor and allowed my GPA to remain intact. It was a good ride, classmates. Let's never speak of it again.
Anyhow, this was a much less mystifying grade report than say spring quarter when I aced Conlaw and International Law despite ardently not understanding any aspect of those classes. There's almost a sense of proportion involved in these grades to the extent that they reflect where I felt competant and invested my energy. And so, I feel complete and relieved as I return to picking at my cuticles and biting my lip. Three more grade reports to go (and, really, if I've learned anything from the 3L's it's that the last quarter never matters, because by then you either have a job or have resigned yourself to the multitude of options available for assistant managers at various college bookstores and pizza delivery joints), so really only two! My how time flies
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