After some time in law school I’ve been surprised to learn how arbitrary the grading is compared to undergrad. In undergrad you did assignments and got grades on them and that was your grade. In law school classes have a 10% participation score that is entirely arbitrary, professor discretion to round up or down by a grade step on top of the participation score, and exams are usually clustered around a 20%ish range. Where the majority of exams are within 10-20% of the same raw score. Often the range is lower than that.
So I was surprised to learn how much discretion professors have with assigning grades. They can easily give you a grade above or below what you scored on the exam. And in the most egregious cases the same raw score exam could plausibly score a B- or an A because of the discretionary grading.
It’s just surprising with how much rides on your grades in law school how arbitrary the grading process is. Especially considering undergrad which you would assume would be less meritocratic, but in my experience was more meritocratic.