You Got An A! Law Schools Retroactively Increase Grades of Students to Make Them More Attractive in Job Market

Students at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles suddenly got smarter. The law school has increased the grade point averages — retroactively — across the board to make graduates more attractive in a tough job market. Loyola is not alone in such grade revisionism.

Loyola students will receive an added 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. According to the article below, at least 10 law schools are also engaging in such grade revisionism, including New York University, Georgetown, Golden Gate University, and Tulane University.

Stuart Rojstaczer, a former geophysics professor at Duke who now studies grade inflation, explained “[i]f somebody’s paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don’t want to call them a loser at the end. So you artificially call every student a success.”

The problem is that these transparent marketing efforts undermine the credibility of all grades — robbing them of any determinant meaning. Ironically, it is analogous to the current view of the law in general, as noted in last week’s column.

Source: here.