Quick comments on the curve

I was going to post this as a comment, but it was getting kind of long, and I had had no inspiration for a blog post, so I said to myself, Self, why not turn this comment into a post??

Anyway, in response to my last (self-congratulatory!) post, What Now? asked:

So, um, not to state the obvious, but ... doesn't grading on a curve essentially make it each person for him or herself and work against student cooperation? How does that work with the fabled law school study groups? And is the theory that law is a dog-eat-dog world, so that one might as well get a head start on competing with others? But don't lawyers actually work with one another a lot of the time?

So, the curve - everyone's least favorite element of law school...

Literally, the curve does pit everyone against everyone else. If my friend and I take the same exam, and write 99% the same material, but she includes 1% more of what was expected/required than I do, even if the exams would get the same grade in every other reasonable universe (like the classes I used to teach!), she will get a better grade than I will. And whether those grades are A/A- or C/C- depends entirely on what everyone else in the class did anyway.

In theory, that should result in people being unwilling to help each other because one student doing well means that another student has to do worse; there's none of the "If everyone in the class learns all the material I'm happy to give everyone As" that I used to say when I was teaching. If someone gets an A, someone else gets a C to balance it out. (Or at least, something like that; there are enough different ways to curve a class's grades that I don't know exactly how the profs at my school do it.)

In practice, however, it hasn't been a problem.

First of all, the fabled law school study groups are, at least in my school, kind of a fable... I know people who tried them last year, but I don't know anyone who kept them up consistently over the course of the semester. The only time I've seen study groups work has been short-term, when people gett together during finals to do practice exams together. Those are really helpful, and I guess the idea is that any help you're giving other people is balanced out by the help you're getting! There are certainly people who don't study in groups, but I think it's more because they don't find groups helpful than because they fear giving aid to the enemy.

(I try to do practice exams with other people in the period leading up to finals, although last semester, that didn't always work based on who I had classes with and when the exams were. Amusingly, thinking about it, my lowest grade was in the class I did the most practice exams for, and that highest grade was in a class I did NO practice exams for... although last spring, my lowest grade was in a class I did no practice exams for, so I'm not going to take that as a winning strategy.)

I'm lucky that at my school, the atmosphere is very collegial and supportive, despite the fact that yes, the curve pits us against each other. I guess we mostly operate on the theory that there's no honor to doing well if it's because you sabotaged someone else. After all, this is a fairly small legal market, and most people practice locally when they finish; you WILL run into your classmates all the time, and if you were a dink about helping others out, they WILL remember. (I think there may also be some of Castiglione's sprezzatura to this: getting good grades because you're a machine grinding away on your work on your own is definitely good. But making the good grades look effortless - making them look easy by being willing to give assistance to any who ask - is even better.)

I don't know to what extent the atmosphere is different at other schools - I'd love to hear about other law students' experiences. Certainly the reputation for law school, in general, is intensely competitive and unpleasant, but I do find that the culture of my law school mitigates that. (I actually think competing for the same jobs is much more frustrating and unpleasant than competing for grades on the curve, but then, I'm doing okay on the curve so far, and job applications give me academic-market-induced flashbacks, so I may not be representative!)

It is frustrating sometimes to feel like your grade didn't represent your actual effort/knowledge, but it is what it is. What's kind of nice, though, is that if you're unhappy with a given grade, you can blame the curve, and not your inherent abilities. (Which is what I did with my lowest grade from last semester.) If everyone gets the grade they "deserve," and everyone else gets As/Bs and you get a C, it's easy to think you're a total idiot and loser. But when you know that only a small number will get As, and that any A has to be balanced by a C, and you get a C, then you don't have to feel like an idiot - you just have to accept that for whatever reason, many of the people in that given class on that given day wrote a better exam than you did. The difference between your raw score and the A raw score might only be 5 points, but someone has to get the C. So you may have known the material perfectly well; others just knew it slightly better. It makes the grade slightly less personal. (Bad grades still suck, but it's possible not to take them as a referendum on your inherent abilities.)

As for the theory behind grading on a curve: I don't think it's to pit students against each other (at least, not now - that might have been the original motive, who knows? As far as I know, law schools have always graded on a curve, so I'm not sure there's much examination of it by this point). One of the reasons for using a curve is that it can help as well as hurt people. If everyone knows the material really well, my way-more-than-adequate exam can get a very ordinary or even bad grade, because everyone else knew just a little bit more. But on the other hand, if everyone in the class TANKS the exam, the curve means not everyone does terribly, and you can get a really good grade just for not being quite as awful as everyone else. (It's kind of like why some of the sciences grade on a curve, as I understand it - the average grades on some tests would otherwise be in the 40s or 50s! One of my profs who had a multiple choice component told us that last year the average grade on the multiple choice was 60%. It's MUCH nicer for that 60% to equal a B rather than a D!)

My personal theory about the curve is that it's a mechanism to force some kind of ranking of the students. Because of the way law school admissions work, everyone at a given law school tends to have had a very similar GPA/LSAT score (you can have the occasional outlier, especially when someone with high scores for your school goes there because they got a scholarship, but usually everyone's within a relatively narrow range). At most schools, these are all students who did really well in undergrad and are used to academic success. Without a curve, you'd probably have a lot of classes in which everyone got kind of around the same score. And then it would be difficult to distinguish between everyone, and employers would get cranky. The big fancy important firms want to know which students they should hire, and want to be able to distinguish their hires from other people's hires by trumpeting their fanciness (top student in his class! Order of the Coif! Magna cum laude! etc.). Even if law school grades don't always correlate directly with lawyering ability. (This is why the very top schools, like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford can get away without giving letter grades - I think they're all some variation of High Pass/Honors, Pass, Fail; their brand is a proxy for ability and prestige. You can brag about all the Harvard and Stanford grads at your firm even if they actually graduated the bottom of their classes, because hey, Harvard and Stanford!)

So those are my maybe not-so-quick thoughts on the curve. It's funny how resigned to it I've become by now, when using a curve is entirely against my pedagogical principles (I never graded on a curve - the closest I ever came was not counting a question on a quiz if everyone bombed it, maybe). I do believe that everyone should just get the grade they earn, if that means everyone gets As or everyone gets Cs. But I don't run law school. (There are LOTS of things I'd change about law school pedagogy, if I were queen of the universe.) I just have to survive it. And since every law school that I've ever heard of grades on a curve, I don't spend a lot of energy questioning it; I just deal with it. Thankfully, at my school, it's not that bad. 

Comments

[Patty Steck]

Hubby is a 1L at a top 20ish state school -- and they have a curve around a mid-B.

He also had a study group that functioned until the end of the semester -- although, at the very end other folks' outlines either a) never materialized or b) were crap... so, he did all his own outlining... and only shared the outline he committed to. They did meet regularly to help one another with material -- and for moral support.

I found a few things really weird about their grading process..

1) blind grading -- and many profs who don't "plus up" -- so, you can be a slug in class, not prepare etc -- and get the same grade as someone who fully participates in the Socratic method.

2) Releasing ALL the grades at the same time for the whole law school.. even after a month to grade, some profs delayed the whole thing.

3) Dividing the class into "quartiles" -- Hubby's grades put him in the top quartile, while his "law school wife" -- i.e. the most consistent member of the study group -- had only slightly lower grades, and was in the bottom quartile. This is due to the curve...

[idwsj]

I have no problems with the curve - if that's the metric that's used, then I'll go with it. If law school success was measured by jumping ability or something, I'd be fine with that too. I'd just work really hard at being a good jumper.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Patty - Personally, I like blind grading, although most of my profs do have some provision for raising (or lowering) your grade based on participation (and I know I've benefited from it). In a lot of classes it's purely discretionary, but I've had a couple of classes where 20% goes to participation. But yes, if you have profs who don't have any provision for participation helping you, there's no incentive to be prepared for class. It's one of the many pedagogical problems I have with the final exam = grade method. (I try to prepare anyway because I know it helps me in the long run, but lord knows that when I have prof who doesn't care about class participation, that's the class I'll let slide when need be.)

I kind of wish my school *would* just release grades all at once, because the release-one-by-one things drags things out. And in some ways, because your rank depends on how everyone else did, you don't have the final information about your semester until all the grades are in anyway. But delays on your first set of grades are frustrating!

My school only ranks the top third of the class. If you're below that, you don't get told where you are, so no one has to know that they're in the bottom quartile! Which would be frustrating if you're in the top 35%, but not so much if you're in the bottom 10%.

The difference between top and bottom in ranks really can be very very small. Lord knows people whose GPAs (on a 100-point scale) are about 3 points above mine are 10-15% higher than me in rank.

But anyway, congrats to hubby on doing so well his first semester!

idwsj - I know what you mean; and by this point, yeah, the curve is there, and there's no point railing against it. It's not like I didn't know there would be a curve going in. I do disagree with using curves, in the abstract, but it's not my call here.

[joy]

I've just finished my first semester at Columbia. Everyone bitches about the curve (especially the professors), everyone hates it, everyone deals with it. My personal experience--as a non-trad, mind you, so I might not be representative--is that people are not psycho competitive and are generally very collegial and helpful. Of course, I am not trying to get a 1L summer firm job, so among that demographic, there may be more mania about grades.

I got my best grade in the class I liked least and felt least prepared for, and my worst grade in the class I liked most.

Our grades are released one at a time, which is maddening. We don't technically do class rank or GPA, though the top 35% of the class are designated "Stone Scholars," so it's similar to your school.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

hi joy! you know, I *really* wanted to go to Columbia, but I didn't get in... got wait-listed (which I think was just a courtesy "you look cool but your numbers aren't good enough" thing, but I appreciated the gesture all the same). Though I have to confess I'm not sorry not to be paying to live in NYC! But I'm glad to hear that the atmosphere is good. Like you, I didn't try to get a 1L summer firm, which probably made a difference (although I think most people here don't - the market is quite different from NYC, I think).

Anyway, it's nice to hear that it's not just me who feels that way about grades!

Hope you're enjoying your second semester.

[joy]

My numbers were there, but Columbia was still a long shot for me. I think that my background must have made it possible for them to simultaneously tick several demographic boxes and thus make me a desirable addition to the overall diversity of the class. In general, there seemed to be little rhyme or reason to my acceptances and rejections, which is why I've developed the demographic diversity theory.

You're definitely lucky not to be paying NY cost of living, and it sounds like you're kicking ass and taking names wherever you are AND borrowing less, which is all to the good.

I do understand about the rat feeling. I am inordinately, worryingly pleased every time I tap the button and win a pellet.

Now back to Westlaw.