Profs. Volokh and Kerr on grade inflation and grading.

Lots of interesting stuff came out of these posts on a variety of grading issues. I've addressed a handful below. (This is a long post.)

Law school grade inflation is already well known. Some of the commentary is a funny.

Kerr points to Stanford:

As far as I know, the highest law school curve is used at Stanford Law School. Stanford has a 3.4 curve, which is a notch higher than the 3.2 or 3.3 curve most Top 25 schools use. According to the Fall 2001 issue of The Stanford Lawyer at page 8, Stanford raised its curve in 2001 from a 3.2 to a 3.4: the reason for the change, according to the article, was “to express more accurately the quality of student performance in upper-level courses” and to “enhance students’ job opportunities.”

Doesn't it seem like that justification is somewhat lacking in any sort of logic? Raising grades, inherently a relative measure, should somehow be seen as a way of better expressing quality? By that methodology, wouldn't it be best just to move to a 4.0 mean, with a 4.0 cap? If a 3.4 mean is expressive of the quality of Stanford's students, surely a 4.0 means they're that much better. Maybe 11?

Volokh addresses the justification for UCLA's recent changes:

4. As best I can tell, the increases in our grades have been driven by one main factor: The increases in grades at other schools. We shifted to a B median in the mid-90s because we noticed that most Top 20 schools had a B median. Our B- students were roughly comparable in class rank to B students at peer schools, but they looked worse to employers who weren't that familiar with the UCLA system. (An employer could of course look closely at the descriptions of the grading systems and figure out the difference, but we were afraid that many employers wouldn't look that closely.)

We shifted to a B+ median recently because we noticed that most Top 20 schools had done the same. I'm pretty confident that we were at the trailing edge of the change, not the leading edge. We didn't want to increase our grades beyond what others were doing, but we also didn't want our students to be at a disadvantage. This sort of behavior may be bad in some overall sense. But it is sensible for a school that's trying not to leave its students unfairly disadvantaged. If someone suggested some multi-law-school grading reform, I might endorse it (though I can't speak to any antitrust law questions this might or might not raise). But so long as each school has to make these decisions by itself, I think we did what we had to do.

I'm apparently pretty dense, because it seems to me that most of these differences don't exist when one considers the heavy use of class rank in law school placement. Now, perhaps if a recruiter is looking at a grade in an individual class, there might be a problem. However, that just doesn't seem to fit the mold we hear about. Basically, I wonder if this is a real problem, or if this is a made-up problem based on anecdotal whines. Recently, there was a limited push by the SBA at USF to look at raising the median; I think it's withered on the vine. I guess I figure if I just claw my way back toward the top 10%, I'm not really that worried about the absolute GPA. I have a really difficult time believing that GPA is a number in wide use by legal recruiters, given that people don't normally talk about anything other than position in class.

Non-law-school people I meet (which is most, given the whole working full-time thing) ask me all the time about the justification for the curves, most feeling it doesn't make much sense. Volokh gives what I think is one of the best justifications here, in particular:

Sometimes I draft a hard exam and sometimes an easy one. I often can't tell which is which, since they're all easy to me -- I know the material, after all! So something might look to me like a C exam not because this student is unusually bad, but because the exam was just harder than ones from previous years.

Next, and I thought this was really cool, Volokh calls students who get A's and A+'s to congratulate them. I don't know the actual logistics of that. My professors have said they don't get the list matching names to grades until well after grades are submitted. Some have said they don't like looking at the lists, because they don't want to color their opinions of students if they encounter them in later classes, or in some cases, because they don't want students to feel they've got negative halos when they encounter professors later. I have no idea how many of my professors look or care to look. I would think many would at least be curious to see how certain people did. However, I have no idea. This may be a sign that I don't interact with enough of my professors outside of class.

And finally, for those who have any question about this grade inflation concept, Prof. Volokh provides Justice Blackmun's law school grades:

• 2 As.
• 4 Bs.
• 8 Cs.
• 3 Ds.

And that was good enough for top 25% at HLS.

Law students today, even at the harshest-grading schools, have nothing to complain about, it would seem.

It's funny that it's the top schools with students complaining, because I think the folks I have seen hurt most by pure GPA are people I have talked to from lower tier schools who have a 2.0 curve but then their scholarship is based on maintaining a 3.5 or so.

I recently read an accusation directed toward a lower-ranked school that apparently doles out large sums of scholarships. The scholarships carry with them a requirement to maintain a 3.0. Apparently, the school then puts all of its scholarship recipients into one section. Even with a 3.0 median (and I assume they use a median and not a mean) that would mean that half might lose their scholarships.

Those with the vicious 2.0 curves are just looking for first-year tuition income most likely.