This table shows the breakdown of percentile ranks by GPA for the University of San Francisco School of Law as of the Spring 2006 semester, i.e., as of the end of the 2005-2006 school year.

How come I never get this information until you post it on here? Did USF e-mail you this information or were you able to grab this off some page somewhere?

thanks

This information right now is in the display across the hall from the registrar's office. They don't provide it to me. I went and wrote it all down and transposed it.

I am working with the new SBA president to set up a new SBA site, and it's my intention to put this information there. My hope is that when there is an quasi-official place for posting things electronically like that, that perhaps then it can also come in electronic form direct from the registrar's office. I haven't spoken to anyone there about that yet.

Otherwise, I would expect this information to come at some point in hardcopy from the registrar's office, just as it did last summer. Information after the fall semester isn't sent, it would appear, and I was too lazy to go copy that information down and enter it. Plus, people look at you funny when you stand in the hall writing stuff down off the postings there. :)

thanks for taking the trouble to do all this!

the reason i initially asked the question is because during the beginning of the spring semester, i saw some students with electronic copies of the fall 2005 rankings. and since you didn't transpose those, they could not have gotten it from you (also, they were very official looking, like in pdf form).

I've never even thought to ask!

I'm not a big fan of most of the PDFs the registrar's office gives out these days. They have them all set to restrict copying, which is pretty annoying. One of these days, I'll get around to writing something to show the progression in the numbers from year to year.

Why is there a gap between the GPAs for the top 10% and top 5% of the 1L class?

5%
3.472
& above

10%
3.195
- 3.292

What happens if I'm a 1L and I get a 3.397? I would be in limbo!

What can I say? Looks like a transcription error on my part. I must've failed to enter the 10% numbers.

In fact, it looks like I filled in the gap by repeating the top-80% numbers.

I confirmed my error while on campus yesterday. I updated the chart.

just wondering if you had any knowledge on curves and stuff...

when people ask me 'what kind of curve is your school on?' i have no idea how to answer. i don't even know what that means.

they, on the other hand, continue merrily, flaunting 'my school has a tough 2.87 curve' or 'i got a 3.24 on a 3.0 curve' or 'the median at my school is 3.20 and I have a 3.93' or something. what does all that mean?

My statistics are relatively weak anymore, so I'll do what I can. Generally speaking, a school's curve refers to either the median or mean grade the school has used to center its grading bell curve. If a school has a 2.87 curve, that means, depending on their mapping of letter grades to point values, they decided that either the mean or median of their student's grades should be between a C+ and B-. A 3.0 means it should be a B. And so on.

These distributions usually vary by the type of class. USF's distributions would seem to indicate a C+/B- curve to me. Many schools use much lower curves, or at the very least less shifted (away from F's) in an effort to weed out their classes.

For a rather exhaustive look at all of this, see Robert C. Downs and Nancy Levit, If It Can't Be Lake Woebegone... a Nationwide Survey of Law School Grading and Grade Normalization Practices, 65 UMKC L. Rev. 819 (1997).

With regards to the tables other than those for 1L, do the percentiles refer to the cummulative GPA or the GPA for that respective year of study? Say a student's cummulative gpa was 3.0 but gpa for 2L was 3.3, would the percentile tables for 2L apply to the cummulative or the gpa for that year?

Also, I have another question with regards to reading the table. My question is best illustrated by an example. Say a student's 1L GPA falls between 2.959 and 3.041. In this situation, in order to qualify for the top 33 1/3 of the class, would a student have to get above a 2.959 or a 3.041?

Thanks in advance for shedding light on how to read the table.

I'll start by noting that after a long discussion with two classmates the other day, I think we finally agreed on how to read the tables, what they mean, and that we were actually saying the same thing. The failure was that I always tend to extrapolate and try to figure out where I'm going to have to be the next year.

The GPA ranges represented are cumulative. It would be rather difficult to establish one's position in a class based on year-by-year numbers. Furthermore, I've only posted end-of-year tables. As a result, percentile position is determined based on cumulative GPA at the end of the spring semester.

The bands are a range. To be in the top third of the class, a 1L's first-year cumulative GPA would have to fall between 2.959 and 3.051, inclusive. The student would be in this group if his or her GPA was 2.959 or higher or 3.051 or lower. If the student's GPA is higher than 3.051, the student will be in one of the higher-ranked groups; lower, and the student is in one of the lower-ranked groups.

(Now, obiously, everyone in the top quarter, fifth, 15%, tenth, and twentieth are also in the top third. I'm just simplifying by calling that grouping a "band", suggesting it's a discrete group.)