Both Eugene Volokh and Orin Kerr have interesting thoughts on law school grading curves.
The details of UM’s first-year grading policy (set out below) are not, to me, particularly intuitive. The basic principles, though, make sense: we have multiple sections in the first year, and we want to do equity between them; yet, we don’t want to ‘force’ any professor to give As that are not in that teacher’s opinion deserved.
After the first year, there is no required curve for regular faculty (and I don’t use one), but adjuncts — who we presume may not know our system as well, and who also have a greater incentive to grade easy in order to inflate enrollments and positive feedback — are on a curve.
I haven’t looked at it carefully, but our first year curve seems a little lower than Orin and Eugene’s accounts of UCLA’s and GW’s; our upper level curve — to the extent we have one — seems very similar.
Some of the colleagues would justify the relative difficulty of our first year curve on the grounds that even though they are rising, our students’ average credentials are still somewhat lower than a top-25 school’s. And, especially at the low end, first-year grades can provide an important signaling role to students who should think long and hard before spending tens of thousands more on tuition.
Other colleagues, and many students, have argued for inflating the curve on the grounds that everyone else is doing it, so we should to.
Personally, I have never gotten very involved in this debate, on the grounds that a rational hiring partner in a firm will look at class rank, not grade average — and we provide class rank information. Many students, however, end even some practitioners, have argued to me that firms are not as rational in their hiring as I would expect…
