The latest, Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, is hoping to bolster its students’ chances of finding work in today’s tough jobs market by retroactively bumping all grades from the past few years by 0.33.
According to the Times, grade inflation is just one of several maneuvers employed by law schools to improve their students’ record, which in turn, protects the schools own reputations and rankings.
“If somebody’s paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don’t want to call them a loser at the end,”said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former geophysics professor at Duke and grade inflation expert. “So you artificially call every student a success.”
The story said it is unclear as to how effective grade inflation is at helping students obtain jobs, especially at larger firms. That’s because they can afford to research each school’s curve and put a students’ qualifications into better perspective.
In addition to Loyola, the Times cited New York University, Georgetown, Golden Gate University and Tulane University as institutions that have softened their grading policies in recent years.
Well, at least they’re trying to help the students, but it does put pressure on other schools to do the same. The law school I went to had a different approach. It was building its reputation on its graduates’ bar passage rate, which was highly valued — the percentage of grads who passed the bar exam on the first try (we tied with Harvard one year during my attendance, at close to 100%). And to increase that number, the school had to do two things: Make its own exams tough, and patterned after the bar exam; and flunk out the students who couldn’t cut it. My class at UOP McGeorge started with about 230 students, and 4 years later (evening program) 93 graduated. Of those 93, nine had a GPA of 3.0 or above; the rest of us were between 2.0 and 2.9. We know this because there were more members of the Order of the Coif (top 10%) than there were members of the Dean’s List (3.0 and above).
Haha, as if giving everyone an A+ will create more jobs in this over-lawyered market. As if giving everyone a 4.0 will stop the ABA from accrediting more diploma mills. As if giving everyone a gold star will prevent the outsourcing of legal work to India.
Law employers only care about your class rank and your school’s rank. Better to be 50th in your class at Columbia with a 3.00 than 1st in your class at Touro with a 4.33. The law school deans know this, but it’s all they can do to appease their students who are now holding a near-worthless degree that cost them 3 years and $150,000+ in student loan debt.
The problem with this philosophy:…. if you give law students better grades than they deserve, they won’t study as hard for the increasingly difficult-to-pass CA Bar Examination. As a result, the school’s Pass Rate will suffer and therefore, their Rank and Prestige will suffer.
There are some law schools that take the opposite approach…. they give their students lower grades than they deserve in an attempt to motivate them to study harder for the Bar Exam, which usually has the effect of raising the school’s Bar Pass Rate.