A Case for Grade Inflation in Legal Education
papers.ssrn.comI had a friend who graduated from University of Iowa law school. If I remember correctly, he told me that everyone had their GPA bumped up by a third because graduates weren't measuring up to other law schools if potential employers filtered by GPA.
Found this at http://www.law.uiowa.edu/documents/2010-11_handbook_web.pdf which would seem to back it up since he was in law school at this time: "In November 2005, the faculty decided to adjust the grading scale and grading curve applicable to the students who entered the College in May 2004 and thereafter. This change included a retroactive adjustment of the grades of students entering in May 2004 or thereafter."
And wikipedia has an article showing a pretty large range with where various law schools set their 50% mark. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_school_GPA_curves
I'm a University of Iowa College of Law graduate (enrolled in 2002, graduated in 2005). When I was there the grading system was quite odd - if I remember correctly the average grade was a 78, and getting something like an 82 would put you in the top 25% of the course. A 90 was the standard highest grade you could get, and scores of up to 92 were reserved for extraordinary achievement.
I'm pretty sure that this system put graduates at a major disadvantage - nobody understood what the grades meant and the career office encouraged us to put some type of explanatory note alongside our transcript. So I'm happy that they made the change, but alas it did not come soon enough for me (the change being transitioning from the numeric system to letters).
I've done a lot of thinking about this subject, and I think that the only fair way to assign grades is just on forced rank in class. Everything else would get gamed (or a school's refusal to game would put the student at an unfair disadvantage).
What I would think better is that law schools get grades normalized according to how their students do in the bar exam.
There should be an external organization that can collect grades and retroactively adjust them according to this principle. Any law school that refused to participate should be rightly viewed with suspicion.
The point is that it doesn't matter what the scale is. Just that it be comparable between schools.
The bar exam has little to nothing to do with what's taught in law school. Virtually everyone takes a six week, several thousand dollar cram course to prepare for the bar. Passing is a factor of how seriously you take this cram course and raw intelligence. Both of these factors are predictable before even starting law school -- the first corresponds roughly to undergraduate GPA (adjusted if necessary for major), the second to LSAT score. The only other major confounding factor is that those who have English as a second language tend to fare poorly, even when taking the normal predictors into account.
More prestigious schools don't have better outcomes because they are better at teaching, they have better outputs because they start with better inputs. The market for lawyers knows this quite well, and if anything overweights it. So there is no need to double up on the signal via differential grades.
And there should be a federal section of the bar that is the same across all jurisdictions, and that is what grading should be normalized against.
There is a common portion called the MBE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_examination#Multistate_Bar_...
However, as mentioned in another comment, what you learn in law school and what you need to learn to pass the Bar exam have relatively little overlap.
This is satire, right?
I don't think so, especially given these sentences:
"C marks virtually always denote unsatisfactory work in American graduate education. Law schools are the primary exception to this convention."
So it sounds like there are some law schools where the curve is simply that the bottom N% get C's or below. The author claims that in most graduate programs, C's are reserved for "unsatisfactory work." Being in the bottom N% doesn't necessarily mean that you're unsatisfactory; it may just mean that you're mostly learning the material, but you're doing a bit worse than your classmates.
It sounds like the author basically wants C's to turn into a soft F. If everyone is making decent progress in a class, there is no reason to fail anyone, even the very bottom student. It sounds like this author is arguing that there's no need to give C's as a matter of course, but only if someone is borderline-failing.
It sounds like the biggest issue is that C's being reserved for unsatisfactory work has been implemented at some law schools but not all. Since most employers aren't that savvy and can't know everything about every school, students at schools that routinely give out C's are hurt by the lower GPA that says more about their school than what they learned.
Ultimately, the author seems to be calling for a grading scale that is more similar between schools. But it's easier to convince schools to do that through inflation of the harder-grading schools ("Help your students!") than deflation of the easier-grading schools ("We promise this won't hurt your students ... if everyone else follows along")
I was a faithful reader of the law school scam blog before he furlowed it, a lot of his pieces were almost tragi-comic on a scale of Aeschylus and Euripides and those guys e.g.
http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/02/straight-...
My law school curved everything to a 3.1 average. Which means that I had a lot of B grades. Unfortunately, if I want to go to another grad school or apply to non-law jobs, they will look at this and not understand. Undergrad transcripts are riddled with high As due to grade inflation, but they see the law transcript and think you're mediocre because you only got one A in 3 years.