A Virtue Of Mandatory Law School Curves

Over at Prawfs, Ethan Leib is collecting data about law school curves.  I encourage interested readers to visit and share their own schools' rules and provisions. 

We've heard lots of talk about law school curves lately - particularly in light of this mess of stories - and while we can debate their virtues and vices at length, I do think that there is one real positive to mandatory distributions.  Virtually every law school class has several students at risk of bar failure.  Mandatory distributions, particularly ones that have significant spread (i.e., don't have a very high mean)  help the law school identify these students.  Once schools know who needs extra help, they can intervene - with supplemental programming and academic support - and increase the odds that at-risk students will pass the bar.  If you're in the bottom half of the class, grades are always going to be the weakest part of your resume.  But the single most important fact on any lawyer's resume is whether he or she is admitted to practice.  Nobody likes a C, but it sure as hell beats failing the bar exam.

Update: A further point that I haven't made clear, perhaps, is that a mandatory curve with low grades also provides valuable information and motivation to these weaker students.  When you have a 3.0 GPA and are near the bottom of the class, it's hard to imagine that you need supplemental academic work.  But a similarly ranked student with a 2.4 GPA probably gets that message - and gets the message that bar review is really, really critical.  And that's all to the good.

Comments

[Jlwoj]

I don't think I understand how curves ensure that low-performing students are noticed. Shouldn't those students get poor grades anyway? Is the point that without a curve, grade inflation occurs and even the worst students end up with a B? (But if so, isn't the presence of a large number of B's on the transcript the signal, instead of C's?)

[Dan Filler]

jlwoj - You're right that weak students might be identified in a non-curved environment. In my experience, however, most exams really do spread out on a curve. And faculty naturally seem to prefer to give high grades, irrespective of this. If faculty are not forced to curve - and to identify some exams as distinctly stronger than others (i.e., with a curve that has some real spread) - they often come up with a ton of B's (conflating what might otherwise be C+'s, B-'s, and B's). The law school can't figure out which B's are true B's and which are true C+'s. Worse, neither can students - and since they're mostly optimistic, few think their B is really a C.

I understand why students would prefer higher nominal grades - they look better on a resume. But my view is that, once a student is in the bottom half of his or her class, grades are not a student's strength in any case. And the costs of having a C+ rather than a B pale compared to the risk of failing the bar.