Academic

Law school grade inflation

By Tung Yin

Retroactive grade inflation at law schools is in the news.

The way I see it, as long as a school uses a fairly conventional grading scale (ie., 4.0 or ABCDF) and it discloses the mean grade on the curve, especially if it also discloses some class rank info, then grade inflation isn't likely to do much.  Employers who care about grades enough to set cutoffs like top 10% or top 15% aren't going to be affected much by having a 3.0 or 3.3 mean, since they're going to be looking at 3.7+ GPAs either way.

On the other hand, if a school uses an arbitrary grade scale that looks close to a conventional grading scale but with slightly lower absolutes (i.e., max of 3.8 or 95), then grade inflation probably does help students.  Back when I started teaching at Iowa, the scale was 58-92, with 85 and above equivalent to an A.  However, students found that employers who weren't familiar with Iowa would look at, say, an 87 average and conclude that the student was a B+ student.  It's hard to blame employers for thinking that way!  Eventually, the law school abandoned that scale and went to a convention 4.3 max scale with a median grade of 3.3.

If you're going to come up with an obscure scale, do what Chicago does (127-155 or something like that).  Or better yet, skew it so that it helps your student body -- make it a 70-110 scale, with 100-110 = A, 90-100 = B, 80-90 = C . . . .

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on June 22, 2010 (boomark / email).