Jeremy's Weblog

I recently graduated from Harvard Law School. This is my weblog. It tries to be funny. E-mail me if you like it. For an index of what's lurking in the archives, sorted by category, click here.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Here they come.... From the registrar yesterday afternoon:

Fall Grades for 2L, 3L, and LLM Students: The Registrar's Office will mail grade reports by the end of the day Wednesday, January 21. Reports will not be available at the Registrar's Office except as follows. JDs who have not received their grade reports in the mail by Friday, January 23, may come to the Registrar's Office during regular business hours of 9 to 5 to pick up a copy of your report. LLMs who have not received their reports by January 23 may stop by the Graduate Program Office starting at Noon. Don't forget to bring your HLS ID card. The Registrar's Office will notify students when reports of remaining courses are available.
Why say in 4 words ("We're mailing grades tomorrow") what you can say in a whole paragraph? Anyone who thought I was just being funny when I said that we don't get grades online and they actually physically mail us a piece of paper now has proof (of course, if you thought I was making it up then, you probably think I'm making up this e-mail too). So probably tomorrow, but possibly today, and definitely by Friday, I'll have my Fall grades. They won't change my life, no matter how well or badly I did, but I'm still kind of curious. It's always nicer to do better than to do worse, even if they won't really affect anything, and even if you're not totally convinced they're even a reasonable representation of how well you learned the material. I feel like there's two levels at which someone can be concerned about grades. There's the "the letters on this sheet will affect my self-image and self-worth" level, and the "it's nice to do well, but not doing well just means I didn't do well, nothing more than that, and that's okay." I think at some point in undergrad, probably after the Freshman year "Advanced Multivariable Calculus and Honors Linear Algebra" class I took for no rational reason other than I was allowed to place into it because I'd done nicely on the BC Calculus AP exam, so I figured if I was allowed to place into it, it wouldn't be so bad, but I had no clue what was going on and scored a 12 out of 150 on the final exam (it curved to something nicer than what that sounds like it should curve to, but still nothing to be that thrilled about; the joke I've made too many times about the class is that the only numbers in the class were the page numbers in the textbook -- this was Math in Long Sentences filled with Greek Letters), I think when I got my grade for that, I realized it wasn't so much a reflection on me as a person as it was a reflection just of how poorly I understood how you prove the existence of imaginary numbers (doesn't that sound like fun?). And that was probably good, especially for my television set, because I felt (slightly) less guilty watching it after that. So, basically, I really want to find out how I did, but I don't feel like finding out I don't know Constitutional Law very well, or at least I didn't show it on the exam, will do all that much to my self-esteem. A reader writing in to tell me my weblog sucks, however, will kill me.