Grade Deadlines and Everything Else that is Wrong with the World

It's that time of year again.

As June grows to a close, law students everywhere start to get impatient and down right angry at times because its been 6-to-8 weeks since they took their last final, and still no grades. Blawgs start pointing out what is wrong with the grading process: grad(e) me!, We Pay Them To Eat Bon Bons, Good, Better. We even did it ourselves about this time last year, oh, and when we finally got them.

This year most of us just got our last grade this last week -- but for some reason we didn't seem to bitch about it as much as we did last year (I'm tallying that one up to the senior slide already starting...).

Anyway, given how prevalent it seems to be that some professors are consistently getting their grades in late, I thought I'd share a story that was shared with me last year when I was bitching about my grades taking so long:

One of the law schools in [our law school state] holds professors' paychecks if they are late getting grades in. Given this, you'd think that would provide motivation to get them done on time, right?

Well, there is one particular professor who, around the end of each school year, goes down to the bank and takes out a loan because he doesn't want to be bothered with grade deadlines. The bank willingly loans him money because they know that he will inevitably get all of his paychecks so he isn't a risk, plus they are happy to charge him interest in the meantime.

The individual that shared this story with me had this professor his 1L year. He didn't get this professor's grade until the summer after his 2L year.

This just goes to show two things:
1. Apparently filing out loan paperwork is more desirable then grading exams, and
2. Even withholding professors' paychecks is not enough of a step to make some profs turn their grades in on time.

Is there any good way to hold professors professionally accountable? If we were active clients of theirs and they didn't return our phone calls for 7 weeks wouldn't we have reason to complain to the State Bar Association?