NYU Law School's New Curve:
See it here, at Leiter's. As best I can recall, NYU's requirement that professors cannot give more than 5% of the class a C+ or below has been in place for a number of years. I don't know about the B- grades, though, which are limited under the new curve to 4-8% of the class. The overall curve is somewhat more generous than what most schools use, mostly because the bottom of the class is treated unusually generously: In a class of 100, only 4 people are required to get grades of B- and everyone else can get a B or higher. (Of course, whether that happens depends on whether professors "max out" the curve, which may or may not be common --I don't know.)
Hardly. I was an open conservative at NYU, and had a solidly above average (if not Law Review-level) GPA. My only politically negative experience was a nasty run-in with a Lawyering prof who was both former ACLU and a terrible teacher.
If I remember the old system correctly, the main difference isn't on the low end, but the high end--there'll be more As, A-s, and B+s, and a little less of the former "everyone gets a B" policy, which I consider to be less a matter of grade inflation and more a matter of better separating the class. The old NYU grade distribution, with regularly >50% Bs, was extremely flat.
When I was a law student, I generally found it advantageous to write "leftist" exams for professors who had a strong left orientation. When I took American legal history, for example, my exam was all about the centrality of the class struggle between the oppressed workers and the owners of the means of production. The grading is blind, so the professor can't tell if you're saying what you really think. And the enterprise struck me as pretty good preparation for legal practice: When representing a client and trying to persuade a judge, you pick arguments that will persuade the judge rather than arguments that you personally find persuasive but that the judge won't.
Anyway, I got an A+ in American legal history.
I understand the purpose of a grade curve. It's a very difficult and, at times, distasteful job to evaluate students' performance. Teachers are reluctant and sometimes not very good at that task. Still, shouldn't we define what is A, B, and C quality work and expect teachers to do their job?
One young man in particular, who happens to have been a student at a college prep I am regularly asked to teach (astrophysics), went on to NYU and had a fair number of nasty "political" run-ins. To survive, he had to do exactly as Orin said.
On the plus side, he made it, went on to some other schools and passed the bar in 3 states, AZ being the latest. He is now in the process of becoming a JAG officer. Great guy!
The NYU policy doesn't appear to limit the number of As in a small class (such as the 10 person example you gave). So, while imposing the characteristics of the population on an individual sample can be troublesome, it looks as though the policy only applies to relatively large samples of 28 or more where the deviation should substantially affect any student.
As I recall, my law school had a policy whereby if the average GPA of a given class was above the school-wide median, then the class median could be recentered to the class average. Also, seminars had a higher median than lecture courses to account for the fact that better students often took more seminars. The result was that when I found myself in a twelve person seminar and nine of the students were on law review (which happened to me at least twice) it was still possible to get the equivalent of an A or an A- by producing a seminar paper of similar quality to the exams that earned me As or A-es in much larger survey classes.
One problem with saying "shouldn't we define what is A, B, and C quality work" is that how students do is highly contingent on what and how professors teach. If I'm a great teacher, students will write great exams; if I'm a terrible teacher, students will write terrible exams. Why should students suffer twice from having bad professors?
Just graduated in May '08. I was openly conservative in class discussions, and generally stayed apolitical on exams. The only exam I remember well with a definite political tone was an Admin class where one question required commenting on an excerpt from Breyer's "Active Liberty". Even in the Employment &Housing Discrimination clinic I took 3L year, I openly stated that I was a McCain-voting Republican and expressed skepticism towards the majority of sexual harassment claims. My grade didn't suffer from it. Granted, it probably helped that the vast majority of my classes were IP-related and therefore apolitical.
Note for others--the NYU curve didn't apply to seminars and clinics while I was there, and presumably still doesn't. Only to lecture classes, typically with at least 40 students.
Also, while I'm here--one of the justifications for the older flat curve was that it increased collegiality among NYU Law students. The sort of cutthroat nastiness that you might hear about at Harvard never came into play at NYU, and students shared notes and outlines freely because there was no real separation at the bottom of the class. If you studied sufficiently and were reasonably competent by NYU standards, you'd get a B. No need to fight tooth and nail to avoid a career-harming C or D.
David Walser, I couldn't agree more. Grading on a curve has some negatives that I don't believe many instructors/professors really notice, either. I authored and taught a rather formidable and fast-paced course later in my military career. As part of that, of course, job task analysis and such had to be performed. In addition, I had to decide how I was going to grade the course. After much head-knocking, I settled on a straight grading system based upon the tests.
That sounds simplistic, but wait. By "basing on tests," I mean that each question I asked counted as a single point. I looked at each separate test as being a subset of the WHOLE test (the sum total of all the questions asked in the course of instruction). So I could have 50 tests, lets say, with a variable number of questions, but at the end of the course, the total would equal 1200 questions asked. The number of those answered correctly, along with labs, etc (scored the same way), was the final score determination.
This had several advantages. You could get a 90 on a 10 question test and a 70 on a 100 question test, but the average would NOT be 80. If no question is worth anymore than any other (and should they be? If you ask it, it should be important, right?). Instead, the average would be based upon the total of 110 questions and the number answered correctly. This prevented the skewing, positive or negative, of an average just because of the number of questions on a particular test. I think you get the picture.
But there was one other, less obvious advantage. If you grade on a curve, gathering statistics on each test question answered is difficult. In my case, since a question was a point (with essay type questions having multiple points, but each point tied to a very specific thing that the student was expected to discuss), keeping those stats was very easy. In fact, it was a natural outcome of the way I graded. Why would I care about those stats?
Easy! With those stats, I was able to determine "bad questions" that needed to be clarified. For example, if 90 percent of the people in your class answer a question wrong, there are reallyu only two possibilities.... (1) I didn't teach the material or taught it incorrectly OR (2) the test question has a distractor that is inappropriate or the question just sux! The same applied the other way around, if a consistent 100 percent or 90 percent of people answered a question correctly, I would suspect that it was either worthless or I wasn't challenging them enough. I "could" say that I was a "marvelous" instructor, but let's get real....... If I am that marvelous, then I need to challenge my students further.
In my case, if a test question was answered correctly around 80 percent of the time (plus or minus a few percent), then it was probably just fine. That doesn't mean you cannot refine the course and tests, but it does mean you are probably pretty close to right on the money.
That was just a couple of the advantages...... but one more advantage I liked was that the students knew, by the minute, exactly how well or poorly they were doing. A sudden "surge" in someone's score (like they are starting to really "get it") didn't impact everyone else in the class...... it just impacted the person who surged.
To the profs here...... whaddaya think? It may not work as well in a law school. I don't know that questions can be tied to very specific goals in law....... at least, goals that would be readily recognized by the prof and scorable in the fashion I mentioned. But for some classes, it beats the living heck out of "curves."
For what it's worth, my school solves this problem by only *requiring* (the requirement is pretty soft in any case) professors to curve grades in classes that have more than 20 students.
The best professors write exams that curve out well anyway, however, in practice the only classes that have a rigorous curve are the 1L classes, Constitutional Law and the various bar exam subject classes. (Decedents estates, Domestic Relations, Negotiable Instruments etc)
It's not a perfect solution, but it seems a good one to me.
However, as a student at a school that does not have anywhere near such a generous grading curve, I'm a bit put out by NYU requiring that professors give only 5% of their class something that was more or less akin to our classes average GPA after first year. (As I recall our class's average GPA after the first year was a mid 2.something, A mid 3.something was enough to get me on law review.)
My civil procedure professor first year used just such a system and tested predominately using multiple choice questions. (He also happens to write multiple choice bar exam questions)
Further, he would publish the results at the end of the semester with the number of students that got each question right and wrong and averages for the whole class.
The clarity of such a system is very impressive.
We Math TA's were not very popular...
The problem is that grades serve multiple purposes. They tell students and prospective employers how a student compares to other students and how well a student mastered the course material. If a lousy teacher gives the best student in class an A -- even though the student barely understands the rudimentary elements of the subject -- prospective employers may be mislead into believing the student has knowledge and skills the student does not have. Even the student may be mislead in this manner.
The curve does tell us how well the student compares with other students taking the same class. Even there, the information can be very misleading. An A in Professor Smith's morning session of "An Introduction to Contracts" may equate with a C in the afternoon session of the same course -- depending on the make up of the students attending each session. So, a curve may tell a student how they did compared to a very small subset of the school, but it does not tell them how well they are doing against the school as a whole nor does it tell them how well they mastered the material.
The real killer, at least for me: when my father took it in the fall of 1953, the intro Calculus class for Georgia Tech freshmen met Mon-Sat at 6:30 AM for an hour, after which there was an hour of mandatory ROTC drill.
In my experience, it is widely understood that law school grades do not indicate how well a student "mastered the course material." No one "masters" material as a law student: A law student in one semester can only get a relatively superficial understanding of an area. Any lawyer who relied on their law school recollection of a topic in the course of providing services to actual clients should be rebuked if not disbarred.
Employers understand this, at least in my experience. For example, employers hiring young attorneys may rely on a student's overall GPA, but they normally do not look at the student's grades in the field most relevant to their practice to determine how much they know.
I did the same thing in ConLaw. The professor was very liberal (yes, even Utah has a few; I am sure Paul Cassell would agree). Knowing and writing to his biases helped me immeasurably. At least I think it did since my professor gave me an A.
When I went there it gave H for honors, VG for very good, G for good, P for pass and F's. Only one professor in my recollection gave an F (four of them)-- Professor Costonis in real property. However, it was very difficult to get an H. Only about 10 were ever given out per first-year section of over 100.
My funniest recollection is of going to get my grade in criminal law with a woman who had graduated Harvard in 3 years with a 4.0 average and had edited a pulitzer prize winning book before going to law school. She had been valedictorian of her high school as well. She (and I) had gotten a G's. She looked at me and said, "OK. H is an A. VG is a B. G is a C. I got a C. (long pause)I really need a drink."
The thing is, we're all in this to get a job, right? but the way I was graded versus someone from NYU doesn't really tell a prospective employer one way or the other whether or not I did better in school. so my opinion is, no matter what method is chosen as best, it really should be standardized by the ABA. like Orin says, you can't account for anecdotal differences (IE different teachers producing anomalous results) but that's a problem no matter what, and I'd wager in the grand scheme of things a rather small one. if grading systems are standardized by the ABA, then two students from different ABA accredited schools can be fairly compared by employers.
As a general, I'm sure that's the case. However, I work in tax. When we hire someone into the tax department, we'll often ask to see all of a student's grades. We might then give the nod to a student who got an A in Prof. Smythe's estate planning class even though the student's overall GPA is slightly lower than another student's. We realize we may be reading more into the A than we should, but we've got very little to go on in making a hiring decision and often ask the flimsiest of data points to do a lot of work. In the hypothetical I've been discussing, we might believe the student with in an A in Prof. Smythe's class might be more interested in a career in tax than the student with a slightly higher overall GPA but few if any classes in tax. In reality, all that A might say is the student was the best of a very dull lot in one particular class.
No, we don't expect any student to have mastered any subject in the sense the student would be qualified to lecture on the topic as an expert. People still serve an apprenticeship.
Could it be that the A in the specialty is not treated so much as a mark of absolute mastery, but as evidence of what area of law a person is willing to spend the extra time and dedication? My IP grade will be much better than any others this semester, and that is because IP is the class I actually wanted to take and it is the field I in which want to specialize.
If the school requires a hard curve such that only one of them can get an A, then those three aren't very smart, are they?
Ha! Each of the three likely have an ego such that each thinks that he or she will get the A and the other two will be left out in the cold.
Yes, that's what it could mean and it's what we hope it means. However, since the talent level in your IP class taught in the Fall likely differs substantially from the talent level of the same class taught in the Winter, how am I to compare two students -- one who took the class in the Fall and the other who took the class in the Winter?
Grades are a terrible way to judge a young professional's potential. Yet, too often, grades are the first screen we use to determine who we'll interview and grades (or a grade in a single class) might be the tie breaker among close calls. Grades appear to be objective and we often fall back on them to justify our conclusions at the end of a very subjective process. It's very frustrating for all concerned.
My first year, I took a class with a professor who didn't like to give low grades -- which effectively meant that he also couldn't give high grades. In a class of 110 students, he gave a single 'A' and 6 or 7 'A-'s. Next year, I was required to keep a certain GPA or risk losing my scholarship, but I had really enjoyed his lectures, so I took him for another class, and tried to balance out my potential grade by taking other professors more likely to give high grades.
At the end of the semester, I was one of four people (again, out of 110) who received an 'A' in his class. On the other hand, in my "easy" class, I only got a 'B+'.
And -- to the poster who thought that politics played a part in grades -- I can't think of a single exam in school where politics played a rule. Spot the issue, state the rule, argue both sides, and pick a reasonable outcome -- it's a good formula to do well on law school exams. Writing about politics is a great way to waste time and lose valuable points.
Expect an unsolicited resume from me shortly.
The only thing that frustrated me about the grade curve at my school was how low it was in comparison to other schools (though yes, I did go to a Tier 4 school) and how the administration finally decided to loosen up their standards in my third year, but of course that only applied to students attending in the future, meaning that a fair amount of students would get higher GPAs than me for doing comparable work. In more prosperous times that wouldn't have bothered me, but with the market so tight I find that every little advantage helps and every little disadvantage hurts.
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