Just to make clear right from the start here, this is not April 1. And this article is not from the National Enquirer or the Onion, but from the New York Times. Ready?
One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.
But it’s not because they are all working harder.
The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.
So a mediocre 3.38 is now an impressive 3.71.
It’s retroactive. And it’s free.
Of course, Loyola Law School will now be the laughingstock of every institution of higher education. Employers won’t be interested in students with fraudulent transcripts.
Well, not quite:
In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month.
So it’s actually the cool thing to do. Undoubtedly it makes your students happy, and probably makes recruiting a lot easier, especially with annual tuition north of $40k.
I have an idea. My graduate schools should raise my grades. But not by 0.333; if they really want to make me look more attractive in a competitive job market, I need at least a 0.666. Why not? I paid a lot of money. I really tried hard. And it doesn’t hurt anyone else.
Or maybe it does.
These moves can create a vicious cycle like that seen in chief executive pay: if every school in the bottom half of the distribution raises its marks to enter the top half of the distribution, or even just to become average, the average creeps up. This puts pressure on schools to keep raising their grades further.
I’m just afraid all of this is going to make it harder to find an honest lawyer.
You can read the entire article right here.
This is happening at all levels to some extent I am sad to say. My sons school district just LOWERED the “honor graduate” status from 3.5 to 3.1 then had the nerve to claim they had more honor graduates than at any time in the history of the school…duh! Unfortunately it seems to be a trend that we don’t want anyone to suffer the effects of having a low self esteem due to performance or lack thereof.
…and we thought lawyers were smart! I can’t believe what they’re teaching their students. If they want to learn anything about being an attorney, they should be SELLING higher grades. After all, that’s the kind of business they’ll be doing the rest of their lives!
This reminds me of the dumb Minimum Wage laws, & national health-care “reform”. I wouldn’t be surprised if our current president were to laud Loyola for its courageous change.
I remember my alma mater struggling with this issue. They were notorious for combatting grade inflation, but they accordingly had lower standards for honors (I think: 3.25 Cum, 3.6 Magna, 3.8 Summa). This system actually worked well for student motivation, but it handicapped students in the real world as they competed with others from inferior schools who had trumped up GPA’s. It’s hard to tell someone in an interview, yeah, but my undergrad was VERY rigorous. The other problem is workload and grade distribution across departments. For example, a degree in pre-med or philosophy was much more difficult than one in business or communications, generally speaking.
So, all that to say, Loyola’s move is weird, but it’s attempting to deal with a very real problem. Princeton university is shocking in this regard because they actually encourage grade deflation….it’s been a huge gripe among the students here. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-03-27-princeton-grades_N.htm