Law students and, believe it or not, law professors do not like the curve. There are no established guidelines that all law schools must follow. Generally, grades must follow a distribution set by the administration. Historically all law schools have adhered to a curve structure so students could be easily ranked. If all students received the same grade it would be difficult for employers to recruit only the "top" students and sell their services based on only hiring the "best." Some top law schools are moving away from the letter grade model. Notre Dame, Columbia and Boalt Hall are among the highly ranked schools who have moved away from mandated curves and grades. Boalt has a pass/fail system with 40% of students receiving a pass with honors. JFKU law school’s curve remains firmly in place.
Barbara Glesner outlines the arguments for and against the curve and grading in Competition and the Curve, 65 UMKC L. Rev. 879 (1997) [Available at Hein Online and Westlaw. Use http://www.jfku.edu/schools/libraries/law/ as a web portal to the resources]. The argument against grades she posits is that grades do not induce learning behavior, but anyone who drifted through Legal Writing and Research because it was the only p/f course will tell you that the graded courses provided more incentive to hit the books. Glesner argues that law schools need to sort students and the most effecient and fair way to do that is to employ a curve.
Although the curve may seem unfair to law students, many schools employ the curve to ensure fairness in the sorting process. A student's ranking within her class should not be left to the vagaries of class scheduling. Law school is a highly competitive learning environment. The curve only increases competitiveness. Is this a good thing? Do we want to inculcate the next generation of lawyers in such a cut-throat environment?
So, by now you are probably wondering how do you defeat the curve. The answer is really quite simple. Lay out an answer that so far exceeds a 70 that you will no longer be in danger of being on the low end of a curve. Check out earlier blog posts that give helpful suggestions for exam preparation.
Subscribe To
Posts
Comments
About Me
- JFKU-Berkeley Law Library
- The Berkeley campus of JFKU Law School opened in the Fall of 2008. Our focus is public interest law. The library is open Monday through Thursday, from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. and open 10 a.m until 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
6 comments:
I don't agree with a system that is automatically exlcusionary, which the curve is. It is a lot of pressure for first and second year students to not only juggle being indoctrinated with law, but then to worry whether you will be a student the following year. I also see it as a way for institutions to reap a lot of money in a short period of time.
JFK is touts to be a "holistic" University, therefore it should shed itself of an archaeic and elite system such as the curve and truly be that progressive school that they advertise to potential students.
Not to play devil's advocate here, but you do not defeat the curve, you only play by its rules. I recall a friend in undergrad who studied furiously to average a 95%, and he just barely passed his class because the professor had decided to apply a pure bell curve to a class with only a handful of people. The person who failed had an average of over 90%. (On the flip side, I received a B in a calc class despite averaging around 45% on tests, because the Prof applied a curve and I fell in the "norm" of a B.)
While grades definetly help me focus, the real question about curves is not why they exist but why are they being applied the WAY your professor is applying them. Curves to not fall from sky, pre-built. Professors (or schools) can decide the frequency distribution and whether the curve has to be symmetrical (is there spell check in this blog?).
While I personally have benefitted from the curve in my school experience, that situation of my friend, where someone fails with a 90%, that's just crazy. Some curves do not serve their purposes of promoting healthy competition and sorting.
As I learned today, the curve existed before the ABA or the CBA came into existence. It tends to serve the test givers moreso than the test takers because the teacher knows at the outset of class the amount of 70's, 80's, and 90's that will be handed out.
I don't know if I agree 100% that it is exclusionary. I think the curve tends to confuse a student who has not been exposed to the curve system because they tend to get lower grades than they are used to. This may cause a drop in confidence and a drop in confidence can be a back breaker in law school.
Law school is about filtering just as much as it is about educating. In my experience, I separate those two aspects into two categories. The first is examenship and the second is lawyership. (I made those words up)
Examenship is administrative. It requires skill sets that can easily be learned though organization, stamina, discipline, and memorization.
Lawyership is a little more ambiguous. Even though it may sound absurd, you are already a lawyer. Eveything stated in the preceding paragraph is mere paperwork. That paperwork will never touch the spark that inspired you to attend a public interest law school. That paperwork should not influence your imagination.
This is only my humble opinion.
See, the anecdote about the professor that rigidly applied a curve to a small class should serve as an example of why people that majored in the humanities should never be allowed to use math. A curve can really only be applied to a sufficiently large sample size and a class of, say, 5-10 students is just too small and leads to odd distortions of grades. I seem to recall that my law school made the curve optional (or possibly even banned it) for classes under a certain enrollment. That professor should have been taken out back and beaten with a statistics book.
That being said, the curve does serve a legitimate purpose. It helps to reduce the “luck of the draw” element associated with first year courses. No one wants to bust their hump for a 73% in the Contracts class taught by John Houseman for a semester only to have a roommate loaf her way to an 80% in Professor Feelgood’s Contracts class. With a curve in place, that 73% in the more difficult section might be a solid B while the 80% in an easier section might work out to high C.
I think one of the most difficult aspects of law school (and college for that matter) is adjusting to the fact that you are competing with a lot of other really smart and driven people, possibly for the first time in your life. By definition, the bulk of such a group is going to be “average”, but you have to remember that being average in such a group still puts you in the top 1-2% of the country. That’s not too shabby.
I completely disagree that the curve system was created to produce "top" students for employers.
In my experience, the curve is never about where the students’ grades lie naturally. It is more about the administration’s ability to distribute grades as they see it fit. How is this producing "top" students?
Hi there! glad to drop by your page and found these very interesting and informative stuff. Thanks for sharing, keep it up!
- p-f curve
Post a Comment