Glenn Reynolds posts that he’s chairing his law school’s hiring committee, that there are mounds of paper with which to deal, and that “there are a lot of affirmative-action hoops it has to be managed through.”
It is my impression that most professors at most law schools practice blind grading, i.e., they do not know the identity of the students whose exams they grade. This practice, of course, is not just color-blind but every which way blind.
But I’m confused. Why does not the principle that justifies color-conscious admissions and color-conscious hiring (and, at some law schools, color-conscious selection of law review editors) not also justify color-conscious grading?
In the second post on this blog I voiced the same confusion:
Blind grading … seems like something of an anomaly, a little island of (color+)-blindness surrounded by a virtual sea of color-consciousness. There are racial preferences for admission to selective and some not-so-selective colleges; there are racial preferences for admission to law school; and after graduation there are racial preferences in hiring in many firms and organizations. Given all that, why NOT have race-conscious grading as well? I’m having a hard time imagining what the argument against it — especially a principled argument — would be from people who support racial consciousness everywhere else and, indeed, are sometimes heard to argue that it is racist NOT to take race into account.
I asked the same question in two posts last spring, here and here.
I’ve still not seen a satisfactory explanation.
