UPDATE: A tipster just informed me that the school has now decided to switch to optional, pre-grading Pass/Fail for the semester. It’s not a great solution but it’s better than where they were!

With the University of Chicago finally dropping its Quixotic commitment to maintaining the curve after it looked around and realized all the serious and responsible schools had moved to mandatory Pass/Fail, it looked as though the legal academy had finally achieved real consensus. Professors are achieving varying levels of success in dealing with this, students face timezone challenges, and everyone may also be dealing with friends or family suffering at this time. If students are absorbing enough knowledge to be passable, that’s good enough right now — we can put aside figuring out who deserves sartorial honorifics right now.

But Baylor seems determined to charge ahead to accomplish… what exactly? Employers aren’t worried about a semester without letter grades. Judges aren’t worried about a semester without letter grades. Peer institutions don’t seem worried about a semester without letter grades.

At least the Baylor Law students recognize this and put together a petition to the administration outlining the entirely reasonable approach that almost every other law school has adopted at this point.

Defiantly though, the Baylor administration is going to stick with being an outlier. In a blog post last week, Baylor Law’s dean, Leah Teague, displayed almost inhuman levels of disconnect with the reality of legal academia:

We’re now in our third week of online classes. Our faculty have been meeting (virtually, of course) every few days to make important decisions. We decided early on to stay with our grading system and to address accommodations on an individual basis. Because we are small – student population of 430 – we are better equipped to manage this decision. We spent the last three weeks determining what adjustments we can make to our policies and procedures to help our students. We quickly extended the exam period and doubled the normal number of reading days. Instead of our typically tight exam schedule, they now have a break every few days during the exam period providing more time to study in between exams.

The school added days between exams. This is a “we see that you’re homeless and starving, here’s a coupon for a free appetizer with purchase of 2 full-sized entrees” approach. Sure, it’s a nice accommodation — because who doesn’t like a Samosa now and then? (answer: Jonathan Turley) — but it’s not really addressing the problem, is it?

In the interest of fairness, there are a few additional adjustments the school’s touting:

1. assurance that no student will lose their scholarship on account of grades received in the current Spring quarter (but will receive the benefit of any improved gpa);

2. a modified policy regarding an election to withdraw from one or more Spring quarter courses;

3. a modified policy regarding re-taking a Spring quarter course; and

4. an explanation of the effect of an incomplete (an “I”) in a Spring quarter course.

Clearly the first one is welcome news. It’s also the absolute floor for a law school right now and we’re not going to get in the business of handing out cookies for doing the bare minimum. The rest are just invitations to screw up the rest of a student’s academic progress by putting off classes — a harm the school’s inflicting to accomplish, again, what? To know who got a B and who got a B+?

Is this really what Baylor thinks legal education is all about? Do they really think they’ll get some kind of leg up on the Texas grads by having an “A”? Because what’s going to happen is employers are still going to talk to everyone at Texas anyway. The only thing grades accomplish is ensuring that picky employers limit their interviews of Baylor students based on results that may or may not be representative. I’d offer Baylor congratulations on playing themselves, but I cannot imagine these admins have ever heard of DJ Khaled.

That blog is titled “Training Lawyers As Leaders” which seems the height of irony right about now since their definition of leadership seems to be “Stay The Course No Matter What Happens,” which could be the title of a MasterClass taught by the captain of the Titanic. It’s not actually leadership to refuse to seriously adapt to new realities and bucking the rest of the academy to “own the peers” doesn’t make a leader.

But this is the school that desperately tried to hold onto Ken Starr after the university already fired him over the whole “looking the other way over a massive sexual assault scandal” thing. Maybe adapting to reality just isn’t their strong suit.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.