The Case For A Tough Curve

The media is loving the law school GPA inflation story. As we learn from scholars of social crises, news stories work best - and gain the most traction - when they are part of an existing, understandable, and compelling news frame. In this case, the pre-existing frame could either be characterized as "hating on lawyers" or "the legal industry in crisis." I think this story has legs because it neatly fits into both. One might re-title the narrative as "look at these sleazy law schools doing anything they can to find their sleazy law grads jobs." 

While I find the media angle pretty interesting, I'd like to ask another question: why might a school choose to have a tough curve?  It's not that lower grades are inherently more accurate.  Grades are not in any sense natural, and law school grades are particularly synthetic.  So why not build the curve around an A-?

First, a school might want to signal to the outside community that it's tough. An implicit, but not necessarily accurate, message flowing from a lower mean GPA is that the school is more rigorous  and consequently produces better grads. For example, my sense is that the military academies give relatively low grades and we expect (and respect) that. One reason that grade inflation is such a scandal is that many people seem to infer that courses at these schools have suddenly become easier. (Of course, that may or may not be true.)

Second, tough grades help employers identify the strongest students. A lower mean typically widens the curve, creating more differentiation between students. Top schools, like Harvard, want to blur the lines between average and exceptional students. That's because an elite firm will hire Harvard grads no matter what - even if they are at risk of hiring a few underperforming students. At the 185 schools outside the Top 15, however, big firms are less interested in absorbing this risk. And any law school that inflates this risk will be less appealing to selective employers.  This goes double when the prospective employer is a Federal judge.  

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a wide curve  helps law schools better identify at-risk students and thus allows the institutions to provide crucial academic support earlier. It turns out that, with early intervention, weak students can still pass the bar at pretty decent rates (assuming, that is, that the law school only accepts qualified applicants.) Thus, low grades can actually benefit the students who might appear to suffer the most.

There are reasons to boost the curve as well - reasons worth exploring - but the decision is far from a gimme. 

Comments

[Ben Buchwalter]

I think this article highlights that at the end of the day, grades are essentially meaningless. Sure, they show that of two students at the same institution, the one with an A- average likely performed better than the one with the B average. But that system falters when you're comparing students at different schools. The student with the B average, for example, might have done better than the A- student at an easier institution. But there also countless other factors to take into account, like workload and difficulty of courses.

My strongest impression from the Times article was that the most accurate way to judge students is to adopt the pass/fail system, like Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley. In this scenario, the students who stand out the most to their professors will get stellar recommendations, as opposed to those who simply limped along.

The difficulty of this system is that all schools would have to implement the policy simultaneously. Any perspective on whether this is possible or realistic?

[Eric Fink]

At Elon, we have decided to buck the trend and alter our grading scale and curve downward (both adopting a lower mean and capping our scale at 4.0 rather than 4.3 as had been the case up to now). The three reasons Dan identifies pretty much sum up the reasons that came up as we discussed the matter. We'll see how the it plays out.

As for pass/fail, I do think this is the most rational option, and I expect to see more schools among the top tier go that route. But, for lower-ranked schools, and perhaps especially for new schools, it would be a risky move at least until pass/fail gains widespread acceptance. I say that as a sociological, not a pedagogical, observation.