...and they're off!

Grades are slowly trickling in and with them comes the disappointment. The night before the Torts grade was posted our law section got together at a local bar to celebrate the end of exams. Away from the crowd, I was discussing over a drink with my buddy our high chances of receiving either an A or an A+ --- in my head no one outside my elite study group, the group that met four times a week two months before the first exam, the group that had stacks of study materials and blocks of time reserved in library study rooms could do better than us--I thought to myself scanning the rest of my classmates "hey, even if I messed up a couple of things, I could still beat 98% of these morons!"

Before I'm judged as some super competitive grade freak, let me lay out what grading at a 2nd tier law school is like: 1) Theres a mandatory curve, very very few people get A's, generally the top half of the class receives a B and above, the bottom half receive a B- and below
---the very few people who totally mess up an exam get Ds or Fs, but they are rarely given.
The Job/Final Grade Break Down
A+ --- Youre golden, any job you want you can get and get paid a lot for
A and A- --- You get paid, but not a lot of options
B+ ---Happy with what you can get
B --- Lower paid lawyer jobs
B- --- will motion for food
C, C-, C+, D, F --- Garbageman, various garbagehandling duties

Our grades are posted once a day at 7am, so that means everyday Im up early as I can be, and like Christmas morning I scamper to my computer in my Pjs and check if any grades have been posted

B-

I stared at my grade intensely-- as if my staring hard enough would somehow zap my grade out of existence.
"There has to be some mistake!"

An IM popped up with "I got a B" It was the same buddy in my group I was talking to at the bar the night before.
"B-" I type back, the grade thats a hair above that career death sentence of a C
"Dude...someone in our group got a C" What? How did half of our study group do THIS bad?! yesterday we though we were on top of the world, hell we thought we were the world!

Reality set in-- just as it probably had for all my classmates that morning. Everyone thought they were geniuses--all were top of their class in undergrad, everyone thought that they had the A, everyone knew or thought they knew all 500+ pages of the casebook, and now everyone is staring at their grade--with full knowledge of the importance of their rank and average in the extremely completive lawyer job market. Everyone now knows they have to get one of those crucial 6 A's available in each class to pull up their average. And now they know that more people than they think are capable of getting those few A's.

The rat race has begun.