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Thoughts on Law School Grading Curves

Eugene has some interesting thoughts on UCLA Law’s grading curve over at the VC, and I thought I would add some thoughts based on my experience with GW’s curve.

In the 2002-03 school year, I was on a faculty committee at GW Law that looked into whether GW’s grading curve was out of sync with other comparable schools. We assembled information on the top 25 or so schools, and found that GW was indeed out of sync: We were still using a 3.0 mean curve, and our curve mandated that at least 15% of students in all large classes received a C+ or below. At the time, only GW and UCLA were still using that kind of curve; almost every other school had already moved up to a 3.2 or 3.3 mean curve. (I’m excluding schools like Chicago and Yale that have their own grading systems.)

The unfairness of using a lower curve was made particularly clear by the experience of one of my colleagues who covered a class at Georgetown one semester, and ended up giving the same exam to Georgetown and GW students at the same time. According to him, the raw scores of the GW students were slightly higher than the raw scores of the Georgetown students. But because Georgetown used a 3.3 curve and GW used a 3.0 curve, he was required to give GW students lower grades than the Georgetown students for the same raw score.

GW ended up adopting a curve that is right in the middle of the curves used by other Top 25 schools. Based on Eugene’s post, it looks like UCLA has done much the same thing.

As far as I know, the highest law school curve is used at Stanford Law School. Stanford has a 3.4 curve, which is a notch higher than the 3.2 or 3.3 curve most Top 25 schools use. According to the Fall 2001 issue of The Stanford Lawyer at page 8, Stanford raised its curve in 2001 from a 3.2 to a 3.4: the reason for the change, according to the article, was “to express more accurately the quality of student performance in upper-level courses” and to “enhance students’ job opportunities.”