How Do Law School Grades Work?

In almost every law school, you are graded on a strict curve. In this article, we breakdown the details and also analyze why even being reminded of the curve can cause law students to break into a cold sweat.

Curved Grading

Most of us are familiar with the concept of a curve: it means scores must fall along a predetermined distribution.

In a true curve graded class, the exact number of As, Bs, Cs etc. is picked ahead of time and student’s scores must be made to fit that. Typically, this supposed to follow what is a called a normal distribution, better known as “a bell curve.” Here’s what this looks like:

Bell curves are found all over nature: in height, in weight, and arguably, in intellectual ability. Making grades conform to a bell curve reflects the idea that we expect most people will do about average, and the likelihood of achieving some value above or below the average decreases the further that value is from the median, so falling on the far right and the far left should be very rare. In a curved grading system, A+ grades and F grades are accordingly only given to a very few.

What grade you receive in a curved grading system is ultimately determined by comparing your performance to that of everyone else in the class. If you about half the people did better than you, and half did worse, you’ll get a median grade. If you did better 90% of the class, even if it was just by a narrow margin, you get a grade at the high end of the curve.

Law School Grading

Law school grading is curved, but usually follows something a little bit different than the typical bell curve.

In law school, there will be a pre-determined median grade that is the same for every class in the school. This is what people are talking about when they say “grades at that school are curved to a B+”. That means a B+ is the median grade at that school.

However, in law school the number of people that must fall at or above that grade is not fully determined yet. Rather, the bulk of exam scores will fall exactly at the median, and the professor determines how many grades will deviate from that. Generally speaking, for each grade the professor gives above the median, he or she must give generally another student a corresponding below median grade.

The average grade (mean of all the grades given) in any given class must fall very close to that median. There is a little flexibility: if a professor thinks they had a particularly strong class, they can move that average a little higher. For a weak class, the average may be a little lower.

This all has the effect of insuring that most students grades will fall right smack in the middle, near the school’s median on individual tests. For most students their GPAs will tend to gravitate towards that median as well, with any bad grades usually balanced by a couple goods one. Only a handful will really break the curve and stand out.

Law schools desire that outcome because it makes it difficult for employers to draw fine distinctions among most students when choosing among potential employees. Most student at the school get the relative comfort of being right in the middle grade wise. It’s not unusual for 80% of the schools students to fall right at the median. Picture a bell curve with a big fat clump of people at the middle.

Blind Grading

Law school grading in 1L year is done by blind grading. When they read your exam, all they see at the top of the test is your exam number. They have no idea who wrote it. They’ll assign a grade to that number, and then the people in the school office record the grade.

However, they do have a right to later on adjust the grade based on a student’s participation…

Participation

If you showed up to every class and shined when you were called on, you might get a little boost in your grade. Similarly, if you were habitually absent and hadn’t read the days you got called on, a small deduction for bad form is possible.

In curved classes, expect the participation component to be minimal. I would imagine no one ever gets more than like a .25 boost (on a 4.0 grade scale). I could be wrong, as there really isn’t anyway to know how each professor does it. It’s shrouded in mystery.

The general opinion is that participation does not play a big role in your grades. It may hurt a professor’s feeling when you don’t show up to class every time, but they are big enough not to ruin your career over it. This becomes important in 3L year, when you might have better things to do than attend class.

Exceptions To The Curve

While you can expect just about all of your 1L classes to be graded on a curve much like I’ve described above, not every class in law school works this way. Often legal research and writing is a simple pass/fail course. You may also be allowed an elective in 1L year that is taught in too small a class setting for curved grading.

In 2L and 3L year, larger classes will generally be curve graded. However, smaller seminars are usually not curve graded. The thinking there is that there isn’t a large enough sample size to meaningfully compare one student’s work against the work of the other members of the class. Grading is instead done through the more subjective method that you commonly encounter in undergraduate work, and thus participation may matter a great deal.

Depending on the school, there may be a limit on how many seminar classes you can take. This prevents people from taking only seminar classes to game their grades.

The Tyranny Of The Curve

This all seems pretty fair doesn’t it? Then why do you hear so many students complaining about the curve?

For one thing, at any decent law school, no one really “deserves” a bad grade. These are insanely talented kids with a high level of drive. They are usually similarly talented and are almost uniformly excellent test takers. Yet, with the curve, there has to be some winners and also some big losers on each exam.

Only a very little might separate the best written exams in the class from the worst, and yet the best ones get a stellar grade, and the “inferior” tests, even if they are still of very high quality, earn a poor grade.

Moreover, most people might be forced into a mediocre middle that is in a sense arbitrary.

Here’s an anecdote from my 1L year. When a few of us 1Ls ran into our property professor shortly after the exam, he told us in all seriousness that our year was the best crop of exam takers he’d ever seen. It makes some sense, since this was just after the recession and we had all worked like hell get into a top law school, competing with the biggest applicant pool ever. Also, we worked even harder once we got there. There was none of the laidback attitude towards grades that I think you get in boom times.

He said if you were comparing us with the pre-recession classes, we would have crushed them. However, do we get better grades as a group? Not significantly. We are compared to each other, and it still falls along the same old bell curve, with almost everyone in the class still gets the same old equivalent of a B grade.

This is a good reminder that you can expect to crush life in law school. I hear a lot of people, after a disappointing performance on the LSAT, talk about how they’ll just go to a lower school and work insanely hard to transfer out.

The problem is, you’ll be in a class with similar peers who also are giving it their all. Law school can be a cutthroat, competitive world. No, people won’t steal your books and stuff, but they aren’t going to lay down for you to win either.

That’s why I tell people all the time that the best time to compete and win on the LSAT. The LSAT is a competition too, with one key difference: most of the people doing it aren’t even thinking about that and are certainly not trying their hard.

I’m not sure if they do this anymore, but I’ve heard that it used to be when they greeted the new Harvard Law class at assembly on the first day of school, the dean would say, “Congratulations, the battle is over. You’ve won.”

So, if law school is in your plans, give it your all on the LSAT. I promise you’ll work like crazy in law school too. It’s part of the culture. But the payout for a even less effort on the LSAT is way higher.

If you ever want to talk about how to do your best on the LSAT, add me on google+ and request a chat: https://plus.google.com/+EvanJones319 I’m happy to give some advice!

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