

A Case for Grade Inflation in Legal Education - branola
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2261393

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arink
I 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>

~~~
idoh
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).

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btilly
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.

~~~
niels_olson
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.

~~~
jforman
There is a common portion called the MBE:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_examination#Multistate_Bar_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_examination#Multistate_Bar_Examination_.28MBE.29)

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.

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brilee
This is satire, right?

~~~
jackowayed
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")

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joonix
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.

