Friday, June 25, 2010
To help make their graduates more attractive in a highly-competitive job market, and protect their own reputations, law schools across the country are inflating their grading systems. Schools taking this approach include Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, New York University, Georgetown, Golden Gate University and Tulane University. Similarly, UCLA, University of California Hastings College of the Law and the University of Southern California have made their grading curves more lenient. In July, Loyola Law School will add .333 points to each student’s grades, applied retroactively.
Some topnotch schools—Harvard, Stanford, Yale and University of California-Berkeley—have done away with grades altogether, replacing them with pass/fail systems. Writing in The New York Times, Catharine Rampell noted, “This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That (by Catherine Rampell, New York Times)
Grade Inflation Spreads at U.S. Colleges; Private Schools Lead (by David Wallechinsky, AllGov)
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