Stanford Law School is dropping letter grades, a move intended to allow professors to be more experimental in the classroom and save student sanity in one of academia’s most rigorous settings.

Stanford will switch to a system of honors, pass, restricted credit and no credit instead of A+ through F, said School of Law Dean Larry Kramer. He hopes the shift will cut the stressful jockeying for status among classmates and encourage students to take more challenging courses.

“It reduces the pursuit of grades as the chief concern of students – they’re learning for the sake of learning, without choosing courses based on worries whether a professor is a tough grader or not,” he said. “Students were too focused on grades, and choosing courses based on grades.”

Without a traditional point system, professors are freed from uniformity such as giving the identical writing assignment to every student. They can also assign more team projects.

Stanford is the second member of the legal “holy trinity” to simplify its grading system. Yale switched years ago; Harvard still holds to A to F. Boalt Law School at the University of California-Berkeley has also abandoned conventional grades.

Such reforms are a luxury of top schools, because students can trade on the name of the institution when applying for competitive jobs. Judges and top firms hire eagerly and disproportionately from the top few schools, regardless of their grading structures.

But at lesser schools, students need high grades to land in the top percent of their class – if they hope to become a law professor at a top 20 school, to get a federal clerkships or be hired at a firm like Morrison & Foerster.

The reform is the latest in a series of reforms to Stanford’s legal education, including skills-based seminars, new legal clinics and and the ability to combine a traditional law degree with other disciplines from business to bioengineering.

In an environment that is highly competitive, the change isn’t expected to send students packing for the beach. Stanford Law students are lifetime high achievers. And the same people who are now gunning for the A will aim for Honors under the new system.

But students welcomed the change to ease trials and tribulations of law school. A tenth of a point can make the difference between an A- and B+, creating great anxiety, they said. Last fall, a first-year student sent a mass e-mail encouraging his classmates to take the entire semester pass/fail. One-third complied.

“Many felt that the old system, which forced grades to fit a bell curve distribution, created false distinctions between classmates,” said Andrew Bruck, 24, a member of the class of 2008.

“A simplified evaluation system will allow students to focus on what matters – learning the law – without the pressures and distractions created by numerical grades,” he said.

Other students noted that it would allow them to focus their time and energy on classes they cared most about, and simply get a “P” – or “pass” – on a class they disliked.

Stanford faculty said that they will be free to offer more oral advocacy projects, or different writing assignments for different students. It will be easier to put teams together because an entire team would not suffer if it included a weaker student, Kramer said.

“We can do it because we’re small and Stanford gets such amazing students,” he said. With an average class size of 12 students, “faculty get to know their students, and their capabilities, very well. Differences will show up,” he said.

“There are still opportunities for students to distinguish yourself academically,” he said.

Veterans of Boalt and Yale predicted that Stanford students would still be welcomed into the legal world.

“For many years now, Berkeley and Stanford students seeking high paid jobs with big law firms seem to have little difficulty getting offers,” said Boalt professor Steve Sugarman. “At schools like ours, only a small share of positions seem to require being more or less in the top ten percent of the class.”

Yale’s Janet Conroy agreed, saying: “I have seen no negative effect on the ability of our students to land clerkships or other employment. The students who come here are so accomplished and self-motivated that they still work as hard as they would have if there were grades involved.”

Although many of the details of the Stanford shift have yet to be worked out, the transition will likely take place next September. There are other issues to be resolved, such as how to ease existing students into the new system, and how to award honors such as membership in the national law honor society Order of the Coif, which is limited to the top 10 percent of each class by grade point average.

“I doubt that the change will make Stanford Law students any less competitive in the job market,” said Bruck.

“If anything, the new grading system will help the law school produce the kind of well-rounded, well-educated graduates that employers find appealing,” he said.