I must have missed it. Or is this sarcasm?

I’m so old that my class was graded on a 0-100 scale with an average of 72 needed to graduate. My average was just above 80 and it put me around the top 15% of my class and on law review. Back in those days, there were no “courtesy” grades; people actually got grades in the 20’s and 30’s; one grade like that and you were usually gone from school. At that time, the bar exam was the ultimate final exam. When I took it, around 32% of those taking it passed.

I think this entire thread contains a bit of nonsense and shows how arbitrary and useless the grading system is (something I’ve written about in posts here over the last couple of years).

Having been on all sides of the system, as a law student, the director of a legal services office that hired law students, and a law professor that gave grades I can say, without hesitation that most law school grading systems have almost nothing to do with whether a student will be a good lawyer.

What’s most rancid about the system is that it is maintained, in great part, so that the large law firm recruitment committees can avoid interviewing the “unfit” students (those not in the top 10%). Often, the “unfit” would be the best fit.

That the law schools distort the learning and grading processes to cater to these big firms is one of my biggest gripes against them.

I disagree with those who contend that the law firms understand each school’s grading system and accommodate them in their interviewing process. My experience is that they look more at class standing than at the actual GPA.

What they are willing to do is go deeper into the class standing pool at certain schools; they claim that the schools have demonstrated excellence; some times it is simply a matter of elitism.

I’ll not defend my law school — I really don’t feel a need to. Like others here, I value the intense, interdisciplinary education I got from a gifted and dedicated faculty at the USC Law Center. I’ve had a great life in the legal world and out of it and my Law Center education opened most of those doors.

What’s most disturbing about this story is the “homogenization” of all things academic — often brought on by things like US News and World Report’s “rankings”. Arbitrary comparisons based on nothing but reported numbers have made it easy for lazy people to overlook what makes institutions unique.

My niece turned down full scholarship offers to attend law school at USC, UCLA, Duke, and Michigan to go to NYU because, in part, in the arbitrary magazine standings, NYU was ranked highest. She’s had a great education at NYU but she would have done just as well at the others. I’m not faulting her choice, only the impact that the standings had on it.

However, the worst thing that these number scales have done to legal education don’t often show up. Faculties wanting to be high in the arbitrary rankings have changed their admission systems and requirements often to the disadvantage of diversity — diversity is not a ranked criteria. And, that does not mean that they are taking better qualified students over less qualified students — it means that they are taking students to meet a magazine’s criteria, not students who would do well in school and add depth and dimension to the student body.

So, what seems so simple, the adding of .1 to a grade point average is, in reality, a manifestation of a much more complex problem — the role that simple numbers play in shaping an institution and its grading policies.

Rant all you want about sc. That’s fine. But, don’t begin to think that this is the academic scandal of the century. It’s not even close.

but realistically, they are just bringing their grading policy in line with other law schools of its academic standing; the 3.3 grade average is common among the top-15 or so law schools (excepting Cal and Yale, which uses a UCSC-type scale, and Chicago’s oddball scale).