In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That - NYTimes.com More fuel for the federal government to increase their involvement in accreditation?
It's interesting that the article suggests this to be the school's answer to higher student debt. They claim that because students are racking up huge debts to go to law school, the grade inflation will help them get a job and ease the debt situation. Higher GPA = Job. That's only a very short-term fix at best. I doubt that it will be effective.
So, this means that the students are basically paying for their grades. This brings up a dizzying array of tragic scenarios. Now, students who failed out of the school might technically have a passing GPA. Or how about send your transcript to an admissions officer for an LLM program, who is befuddled as to why you have a 4.0 GPA with less-than-perfect grades? In the end, it seems, this is a clear case of unclear thinking. For one thing, thes schools are basically lowering their standards and, quite publicly, making a WRITTEN policy of grade inflation. Eeew.... but even more nuts is that if ALL schools do this, the net effect evens out on employment placement and causes standards to be lowered in all of the schools. It also makes the GPA scale needlessly complicated. A 4.33 GPA??? I hope we never see the day.
I think this article is more form then substance. GPA is an important thing in law school, but alone it isn’t as much as people think. Since most schools grade on some sort of “curve” then class ranking tends to be much more important than GPA. Every clerkship and job prefer that the new graduates have graduated somewhere in the top 25% (at least). All things equal, the guy with the 4.33 whose ranked 70 out of 100 will probably not beat out the guy with the 3.8 who is ranked 1st in his class. Since they are inflating the grades of every student then no student really benefits in comparison to their peers. Just my two cents. Could be wrong.
I can think of one instance in which this practice might be acceptable. Suppose the school did research and found that their grading scale was more difficult than the other law schools. Thus a student from their school who earned a 3.0, for example, would have earned a 3.33 at any other law school. If this is the case, students from their school would look worse on paper than other students. If they are doing this to match the general grading scale of the industry, it might not be as bad as it looks.
AviTerra, Thank you for the interesting link. Tread carefully, though; even though this article discusses the general field of law schools (which will affect the overall market for distance students) it does not, however, address distance schools specifically. You can attract attention from the moderators by posting such on the Distance Learning Discussion portion of the forum. Regards, Mark