Legal Commentary

Here's something that gets the goat of many law students: uncurved law school classes. At most law schools with grading curves, students taking classes with roughly more than 30 students will be graded according to the grading curve. Students taking classes with about 30 students or less will not be graded according to the grading curve. So, what happens in these smaller classes (usually seminars)? Well, according to Robert M. Lloyd, Hard Law Firms and Soft Law Schools, 83 N.C. L. Rev. 667, 678 n.62 (2005):

At my institution, a report showing the average grade in each course is circulated to the faculty at the end of each semester. These show the grade disparity very clearly: in Spring 2003, 14 of 18 upperclass exam-graded courses had a mean grade below 3.3, while only one of 16 paper-graded classes had a mean grade below 3.3....All of the anecdotal evidence from other law schools confirms that higher average grades in Softer courses is a universal (or near universal) phenomenon in American law schools. For example, one U.S. News top-fifty law school provided me with a semester grade report listing two seminars in which all students received A's....While some of this grade disparity is due to schools giving more grading discretion in smaller classes and non-exam-based classes, many schools have actually mandated higher mean grade ranges in "seminars." (emphasis added).

These ?seminar exceptions? may be based on two rather divergent rationales:one relies on the randomness of ability, the other relies on the educational effectiveness of these classes. The first rationale exempts small classes from a curve because these classes do not provide a statistically significant sample--there is less likely to be a random distribution of ability in these classes, so we cannot expect a curve to result. Even if there is a random distribution of ability, many seminar classes allow such a degree of flexibility in the products by which students are measured (e.g. seminar papers) that we do not trust our ability to adequately differentiate student ability in these settings. The operative assumption here is that the purpose of law school is to test the ability of students to perform rather than to teach the students to perform ably.

However, given that these seminar exceptions usually do not completely eliminate the requirement of a curve, but rather increase the required means or broaden the distribution requirements, another rationale seems equally likely. This rationale accepts the legitimacy of higher grades when instructional effectiveness is higher. The rationale is well supported by educational literature. Students do truly learn better in smaller rather than larger classes. Students do learn better when they have more formative evaluation (such as rough drafts, practice arguments, etc.). Students do learn better when they have the ability to choose their topic of study (as is often the case in seminars).

For a class of thirty students,...forcing the scores onto a curve will be troublesome because some of the intervals will contain very few students. For classes of the size that are common in law schools and for grading scales with more than a few intervals, forcing a specific percentage of students into each interval is riskier than mandating a standard deviation because each of the intervals involves only a portion of the class, whereas the standard deviation relates to the whole class. With the whole class, small variations will average out in a way that is not likely when an interval includes only a few students.