In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 21, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/business/22law.html?pagewanted=2&ref=business&src=me


One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.

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The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

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Harvard and Stanford, two of the top-ranked law schools, recently eliminated traditional grading altogether. Like Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, they now use a modified pass/fail system, reducing the pressure that law schools are notorious for. This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview.

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One notable school has managed to maintain the integrity of its grades through an idiosyncratic grading rubric. The University of Chicago Law School grades its students on a scale of 155-186, a system so bizarre that employers are unlikely to try to match it against the 4.0 scale or letter grades used almost everywhere else.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/business/22law.html?pagewanted=2&ref=business&src=me

Ran across this and found the concept interesting .........

Bad enough that some compatriots were hired right away after graduation with just phone calls their parents made. This is just as unconscionable to me.

I think inflating grades or eliminating them is wrong, however, very little noise is made about nincompoops getting great jobs simply because they have the right connections.

reality vs science fiction .......... a strange world we are entering........twilight zone revisited

I can tell you a story or two (or three or four) about that which would blow your mind.

Let's just say that law school ain't what it used to be- which is one reason why there all all sorts of fancy new advanced law degrees.

Just say:

Schmidlap graduated 21st out of 58 graduates in 20??.

Brilliant.

If a university can and will inflate grades simply to make its graduates look better, it isn't much above late-night infomercial status. How many failed students are now bumped into the passing range, simply for appearances sake? Why not just tack on a whole point or two while they're at it? After all, if everyone who enters the program gets a 4.0, it looks great!

The idea of trying to reduce the pressure on graduates is not a bad thing. Tacking on arbitrary points to grades is a horrible way to execute it.

I busted my ass to slide through on a 70.5. And it was damned difficult.

Turns out that the law schools in Texas vary widely in difficulty, and I went to one of the difficult ones. And it's not one with the best reputation, either. :grr:

Hell, I guess I should have gone to St. Mary's and graduated with a B average from a mediocre school.

isn't much of a indicator one way or the other of whether one will be a good lawyer. Being able to "succeed" in law school takes a certain set of skills to be sure, but they aren't necessarily to same skills one will use in practice. I've always said that, especially for trial lawyers, that a year of traditional law school training, followed by 2 or 3 years of something closer to an "apprenticeship" in the real world would turn out much better lawyers than the system we have now.

Even if law-school grads these days DO get a job as a first-year associate with some big firm, the odds are high that said firm will postpone their entry for six months or a whole year! Then they'll be sitting around for months with a promised job they can't yet work at, while their HUGE student loans become due and can't be deferred. And when they finally DO get to start work, they'll have to make rain like crazy right out of the gate, or they'll be let go!

Oh boy. If I were giving kids with bachelor's degrees career advice right now, the first thing I'd say is "Do not go to law school. Unless you want nothing more in this life than to be a lawyer. But even then, reconsider."

it is all about class rank, which won't change.

Dumbest idea ever.

I'm reminded of the time Joe Biden ran for president in the 1980s, and claimed to have graduated in the top half of his law school class at Syracuse, when he hadn't. I called up a friend who had graduated from Syracuse Law School and suggested they have a new marketing slogan. "Syracuse Law School - where EVERYONE graduates in the top half of their class!"

Class rankings won't change. If you didn't graduate top ten percent, or top third, or top half, inflating the points won't matter. Grades are used as a basis for firms to limit those who interview, but the problem is there aren't going to be jobs in law for weak graduates or grads of mediocre and bad law schools.