In 1972, the law school faculty voted to abolish its practice of computing class rank. The faculty did so under the conviction that a too-heavy reliance had been placed on a system that seemed to imply substantial differences among students' academic accomplishments, yet was based on very insignificant actual differences among cumulative grade-point averages. In short, the ranking system was believed to have obscured, rather than to have reflected accurately, the relative merits of graduates in many cases.