July 2, 2010--Grade Reform
In a society where "graduates" of preschools participate in elaborate ceremonies while wearing pink or blue caps and gowns and where on Wall Street, to assure profits, a Goldman Sachs cheats its own best clients, is it really any surprise that some of the nation's best law schools are inflating grades?
And I don't just mean by kiting grades of currently enrolled students, the widespread practice where no one any longer gets a C, but of former students.
To help their students survive in touch economic times, and at least as important to protect their own reputation by continuing to be able to claim that virtually all of their grads get jobs, esteemed law schools such as Loyola and Tulane and top-ten places such as Georgetown and my own New York University are adding 0.333 to every grade of every student current and of recent vintage. This is like turning all Bs into B+s. And I guess this means that anyone who managed to earn a perfect 4.0 on her or his own will now see their average puffed up to 4.333. Every student (and parent's) dream.
In case you haven't heard about this, this hyping practice was exposed recently by the New York Times. (Full article linked below.)
The places that do this not only try to get away with it--tricking law firms that might be interested in hiring one of their grads --but also have come up with a very impressive phrase to describe it: "grade reform." To the uninitiated this might even be confused with that rare practice at some decent schools to put pressure on professors to deflate grades. To bring them down and more into line with students' actual performance. Thus, calling the extra inflating of grades "grade reform" is the perfect subterfuge to complement the practice itself. Sort of like its cynical political version best described by George Bush's brain, Karl Rove, who called "reality" "whatever we say it is."
From the law schools' perspective, even more important than admitting the best possible students and providing them with a high quality education is the promise that its graduates will be hired at top-dollar by prestigious law firms.
A student of grade inflation (everything clearly gets studied), Professor Stuart Rojstaczer of Duke University, said, "If somebody's paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don't want to call them a loser at the end. So you artificially call ever student a success." Like at Lake Woebegon "where all the children are above average."
While this is going on down in the ranks of law schools, a couple at the upper-upper end of the food chain have been moving in the opposite direction. Stanford and Yale and Harvard have eliminated grades altogether. They have instituted a pass/fail system where I assume everyone passes every course.
So what are potential employers to do? Though it may be enough to see that a jobseeker graduated from Harvard to call her in for an interview, at lesser places the Darwinian struggle among graduates these days has gotten fiercer. Most large firms are aware of what's going on and are thus looking beyond grades when considering who to consider. Things such as membership in law review or other forms of honor. So until everyone makes law review or receives honors (something already happening at quite a few institutions where almost all graduate cum laude) they may have figured out a good way to separate the academic wheat from the law school chaff.
This for some time has been especially difficult to do with graduates from another very top-ten law school--the University of Chicago. At the literal and spiritual home of Milton Friedman, where the unfettered, unregulated struggle to succeed reached its philosophical apotheosis, they have figured out a grading system so coded that it is impenetrable to even the most sophisticated law firms. The law school there grades students on a scale of 155 to 186, a system that try as they might employers are unable to correlate with the traditional 4.0 garding system.
So I suppose that even at free-market places such as Chicago, again as at Goldman, if normal forms of competition fail to work, cheat.
And I don't just mean by kiting grades of currently enrolled students, the widespread practice where no one any longer gets a C, but of former students.
To help their students survive in touch economic times, and at least as important to protect their own reputation by continuing to be able to claim that virtually all of their grads get jobs, esteemed law schools such as Loyola and Tulane and top-ten places such as Georgetown and my own New York University are adding 0.333 to every grade of every student current and of recent vintage. This is like turning all Bs into B+s. And I guess this means that anyone who managed to earn a perfect 4.0 on her or his own will now see their average puffed up to 4.333. Every student (and parent's) dream.
In case you haven't heard about this, this hyping practice was exposed recently by the New York Times. (Full article linked below.)
The places that do this not only try to get away with it--tricking law firms that might be interested in hiring one of their grads --but also have come up with a very impressive phrase to describe it: "grade reform." To the uninitiated this might even be confused with that rare practice at some decent schools to put pressure on professors to deflate grades. To bring them down and more into line with students' actual performance. Thus, calling the extra inflating of grades "grade reform" is the perfect subterfuge to complement the practice itself. Sort of like its cynical political version best described by George Bush's brain, Karl Rove, who called "reality" "whatever we say it is."
From the law schools' perspective, even more important than admitting the best possible students and providing them with a high quality education is the promise that its graduates will be hired at top-dollar by prestigious law firms.
A student of grade inflation (everything clearly gets studied), Professor Stuart Rojstaczer of Duke University, said, "If somebody's paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don't want to call them a loser at the end. So you artificially call ever student a success." Like at Lake Woebegon "where all the children are above average."
While this is going on down in the ranks of law schools, a couple at the upper-upper end of the food chain have been moving in the opposite direction. Stanford and Yale and Harvard have eliminated grades altogether. They have instituted a pass/fail system where I assume everyone passes every course.
So what are potential employers to do? Though it may be enough to see that a jobseeker graduated from Harvard to call her in for an interview, at lesser places the Darwinian struggle among graduates these days has gotten fiercer. Most large firms are aware of what's going on and are thus looking beyond grades when considering who to consider. Things such as membership in law review or other forms of honor. So until everyone makes law review or receives honors (something already happening at quite a few institutions where almost all graduate cum laude) they may have figured out a good way to separate the academic wheat from the law school chaff.
This for some time has been especially difficult to do with graduates from another very top-ten law school--the University of Chicago. At the literal and spiritual home of Milton Friedman, where the unfettered, unregulated struggle to succeed reached its philosophical apotheosis, they have figured out a grading system so coded that it is impenetrable to even the most sophisticated law firms. The law school there grades students on a scale of 155 to 186, a system that try as they might employers are unable to correlate with the traditional 4.0 garding system.
So I suppose that even at free-market places such as Chicago, again as at Goldman, if normal forms of competition fail to work, cheat.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:17 AM
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