from Hacker News

A Case for Grade Inflation in Legal Education

by branola on 5/13/13, 2:19 AM with 10 comments

• by arink on 5/13/13, 3:34 AM

  I had a friend who graduated from University of Iowa law school. If I remember correctly, he told me that everyone had their GPA bumped up by a third because graduates weren't measuring up to other law schools if potential employers filtered by GPA.

  Found this at http://www.law.uiowa.edu/documents/2010-11_handbook_web.pdf which would seem to back it up since he was in law school at this time: "In November 2005, the faculty decided to adjust the grading scale and grading curve applicable to the students who entered the College in May 2004 and thereafter. This change included a retroactive adjustment of the grades of students entering in May 2004 or thereafter."

  And wikipedia has an article showing a pretty large range with where various law schools set their 50% mark. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_school_GPA_curves

• by btilly on 5/13/13, 4:04 AM

  What I would think better is that law schools get grades normalized according to how their students do in the bar exam.

  There should be an external organization that can collect grades and retroactively adjust them according to this principle. Any law school that refused to participate should be rightly viewed with suspicion.

  The point is that it doesn't matter what the scale is. Just that it be comparable between schools.

• by brilee on 5/13/13, 3:11 AM

  This is satire, right?

• by joonix on 5/13/13, 4:04 AM

  My law school curved everything to a 3.1 average. Which means that I had a lot of B grades. Unfortunately, if I want to go to another grad school or apply to non-law jobs, they will look at this and not understand. Undergrad transcripts are riddled with high As due to grade inflation, but they see the law transcript and think you're mediocre because you only got one A in 3 years.