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Grading
A bit of a surprise today... Don't need to go back.
I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that grade inflation leads to better job opportunities for law students. In fact, in "The one goes to 11," I mocked the practice. I pointed out, "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." Therefore, it gives me no great pleasure to report that USF has decided to repaint the numbers on our grading dial. All current students should have received an email from Dean Micon today informing them of the change. Specifically, we are told that the new policy allows grades to "accurately reflect student achievement, provide students reliable information about their academic progress, and establish a basis for meaningful comparison with both classmates and counterparts from other institutions."
I'm at a loss to explain how any of those things is better accomplished by this changed policy. As I look at the tables, here's what I see: 1) One or two students, who would likely get the CALI anyway, not get an A+; 2) Professors no longer have to give out anything lower than a B- in any elective; and 3) The middle is fatter. There are some other changes, but they seem considerably less significant. Two classes saw the greatest impact. Constitutional Law and Evidence previously had 10% to 20% of students receiving grades of C- and below. Now, it's possible that no students will receive a C- or below.
I know that many students will be jumping for joy over this. A number will be thrilled with the changes to the grading of bar elective courses. I, personally, don't have a huge problem with it, other than that it throws of my spreadsheets and with the 4.3 value afforded A+'s, potentially my class rank extrapolations. That, and that I don't really see the point.
Prof. Hoffman responded to my previous post. One of his commenters takes issue with the "fun stories" lead. I don't. In the big picture, these events aren't going to matter much at all. I've even gotten to the point where I laugh when telling the story of my Contracts II exam day meltdown (sort of a "What are these contract things of which you speak?" thing.)
Concurring Opinions: Reviewing Grading: Part II:
Fun stories, but I think that the number of downward corrections following exam review is exceedingly small, especially when considered as a proportion of the number of possible corrections. The social pressures against professors issuing such rulings are extreme (telling someone that they got a C face-to-face, after they were endowed with an original B, is much harder than giving them a C in the first place). Moreover, the procedural niceties are significantly more likely to be challenged in the case of a downward departure than an upward one, because the student will be kicking and screaming the whole way through the process. Therefore, we would predict that most times a professor spots the possibility of an error in the “curve’s favor” (instead of the student’s) he or she will simply ignore it. This is a windfall for the reviewed student, at the expense of the class.
To be sure, I didn't mean to suggest that grade lowering post-review is commonplace. Nor did I even intend to suggest it's the norm for when misreported grades are found. The school does make it very difficult for professors to change grades; at least, that's what professors and the student handbook tell us. Seeing as the Academic Standards Committee that makes the decisions is comprised of fellow professors, I do wonder how difficult it truly is. Basically, regrading of an exam will not happen at USF. Corrections for mathematical and reporting errors may occur if approved by the committee. (If I had the student handbook handy -- say, if the school would provide it in a digital form -- I would quote letter and verse.)
In my nearly 5.5 semesters here, I personally know of only one student who has had a grade lowered. I personally know of only one student who has had a grade raised. It just so happens that it was the same student in the same semester. And it was our first semester. As a result, those things have stuck with me, and I may well blow things out of proportion as a result.
I'd definitely recommend for those who wonder about their grades or wonder what they could have possibly done wrong to go and find out. I haven't done it often, not so much because of the one instance of grade lowering -- though that did keep me from seeing that prof that semester, and my worst grade in law school came from him the following semester in Contracts II -- but largely because it's been easy to figure out what I did right or wrong. I don't have many grades down the middle.
Prof. Dave Hoffman of Temple wonders about the different exam review cultures.
Concurring Opinions: Exam Review Culture:
The basic story would go like this. At some schools - including the one where I teach - there is a strong culture of encouraging students to come to professors' offices after receiving grades to review the exam and find ways to improve their performance. To my mind, this is a very good thing - not just for students, who can be taught to do better on an economically consequential activity - but for professors, who can figure out exactly how badly written exams confuse test-takers. Somewhere between half and two-thirds of my fall semester class came in to meet with me over the last two weeks (at a half-hour a meeting). But, looking back at where I went to law school, I can't remember ever going to talk to a professor about my exams, nor any of my friends doing so either. Casual inquiry among conference participants suggests that a culture of encouraging colleagues to undertake individualized exam review is more common at schools outside of the traditional top tier.Why? It surely isn't because students at top-tier schools lack incentives to get to know professors. And, I doubt it is because professors at elite institutions don't care about teaching. Nor, in the end, is it because exam review isn’t helpful, or because grades don’t matter at schools without a culture of review.
At USF, it certainly seems to be commonplace. I've never actually done it myself. I've picked up my exams on occasion. Ironically, only the good ones, to see just how good. There's always a lingering sense of embarrassment for me to go see a professor about a bad exam. (And yet, I'll happily talk to Prof. Osborn, who happens to have given 2 of my 3 worst exams, about just about anything but Contracts.) To some degree, I can put poor performance on procrastination, bad exam day, etc., and I just leave it at that. At this stage of the game, I'm not sure how much I'd gain from reviewing exams, anyway.
And then there's the one other bit. My friend who went to review his exam, only to have the professor discover it had been misrecorded to the benefit of the student. And the professor's next move? Why, of course, he lowered the student's grade. And it never would have happened had the student not gone to review his exam with the professor. I immediately knew I wouldn't be going to review my exam with that prof, and I think that was always in the back of my mind when I considered doing it other times.
One other point. The same student who had the grade lowered after the one exam was reviewed had a miscalculation appear on another exam in the same semester for a full grade bump! That was back in first-year. It made it very easy to become jaded about exam grading right away.
Slow-typing alum sues law school - Campus Life:
An alum is suing the University Law School because he believes its grading policies discriminate against slow typists.Adrian Zachariasewycz claims the Law School's grading policy is unfair to slow typists because students who can type more words per minute can write more during timed exams.
Zachariasewycz filed the complaint in a Delaware court in November.
"It's an incredibly obvious claim," he said.
In the complaint, Zachariasewycz says the exams are more of a test of typing skills than understanding of the material.
...
Zachariasewycz said his handwritten papers and multiple-choice exams were an accurate reflection of his grade - but that his typed exams lowered his grade point average significantly.
Because of his poor grades, he is unable to find a job in the legal field, he said.
"It was wrecking my life - it still is," he said.
He claims he was not aware of the cause of his poor performance on these exams until after graduation, when was unable to find a job.
While Zachariasewycz admits that he has not compared his grades with other law students, he said he is confident that the same discrepancy between typed exams and handwritten papers will also be seen in other students' grades.
The suit says that the school failed to notify him that a minimum typing speed was necessary for success, and that they did not compensate for anyone who might be deficient in this area.
So, law student gets poor grades. Law student can't get job. Law student, after-the-fact, decides to sue for some bizarre rationale. What exactly was he doing during his three years of law school to figure out why his grades were so bad? Could he really not get his head around this typing thing possibly having an impact?
Of course, I disagree that typing speed is an inherent advantage. I type fairly quickly, 100-110 WPM on my PowerBook, and around 85 WPM on my ego keboard (see here, here, or here.) I may be faster on the Kinesis now; I haven't taking a typing test in a long time, and in the nearly three years I've been using the Kinesis at work and at home, I've gotten pretty used to it.
Has fast typing saved me? No. Two of my 3 lowest grades in law school came on typed exams with no multiple choice or otherwise handwritten component. In spite of my regular rants about hating multiple choice components in exams, I don't believe I've ever gotten lower than an A- on a timed exam that had a multiple choice component. On the other hand, I have received grades lower than A- on exams that were strictly essay exams or otherwise typed-answer exams, despite the fact that I type faster than the vast majority of my classmates. Finally, I know lots of folks who have done better than I who are slower typists.
Of course, none of this should be news to someone who went to law school. It's not always the amount of content you can get into an exam that is important; it's getting what the professors want to see into the exam that is important. I can spew and spew and spew, and it won't benefit me one bit if it's not something the professor has deemed worthy of points. Hit the high points while going more slowly, and it would be easy and very doable to do better.
Prof. Dan Solove, of the George Washington University Law School, details what we students already knew about final exam grading.
Concurring Opinions: A Guide to Grading Exams:
As you can see, grading takes considerable time and effort. But students can be assured that modern grading techniques will produce the most precise and accurate grading possible, assuming professors have achieved mastery of the necessary grading skills.
He considers one of the most difficult questions a law professor is likely to face:
or
Personally, I'm in favor of the latter, as I type fast and sometimes get overly verbose. That's what really has me stressed about Evidence. A Scantron and 2-page limit on the essay won't help me get to the bottom step.
(Via Madisonian.)
I've posted current versions of the percentile-by-GPA breakdown for USF, as of Spring 2006. I've also updated the USF First-Time Bar Passage Rate by Quintile document.
In the case of the former, the good news (for me) is that my performance this past semester moved me back into the top-15%.
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 was a very good semester. Not a perfect semester; but very good. I won't know until the numbers come out for the semester, but based on last year's numbers, I may have come very close to jumping into the top-15%. (My GPA now puts me about .02 points away from the cut-off as of the end of last year.)
Two closed-book exams; two very respectable grades.
Not that there wasn't a scary moment. When the Crim Pro grade first came up, it said "NR," which I think means "No Credit." Maybe it means something else. I was concerned, because I missed three classes, two while I was sick, and one when I got caught at work. Missing more than 20% of the class meetings allows them to withhold credit. We had 15 weeks in the semester. But then, our professor canceled the last class meeting, leaving us 14 meetings, with 20% being 2.8 classes. And I'd missed 3.
Fortunately, that NR left for something much, much better.
Update: Weird. So, I logged in to the USF site today, and the portal showed I had a personal message telling me my grade had been updated. I guess that first one did post, and then they changed it. I'm sure curious about what the story is behind that.
Ok. Maybe just an automated systems bobble:
- NR Grade "Not Reported" by instructor within 10 days after the examination period is a notation used by the Registrar's Office. To correct the academic record the instructor must file a change of grade form. "NR" carries no connotation of student performance and no grade point value is given.
It's (roughly) 5:30. Three weeks (21 days) from the day of the Criminal Procedure final was Friday. Grades should be in. Why don't I have mine yet?
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