{"id":506935,"date":"2010-04-02T17:57:57","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T21:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c630a53ef0133ec6a07b2970b"},"modified":"2010-04-02T18:35:46","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T22:35:46","slug":"loyola-law-school-boosts-grades-provokes-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/506935","title":{"rendered":"Loyola Law School boosts grades, provokes debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Students at Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles just had their grades adjusted a bit upward without even having to study any harder. <\/p>\n

The 1,300-student school recently changed its grading curve formula for current students and the last three years of graduates by a third of a grade to match the scales of other schools in California. But the move\u00a0also provoked criticism and concerns about\u00a0artificial grade inflation.<\/p>\n

The change\u00a0was intended\u00a0to ensure that its students are able to compete for jobs on an equal footing with other law school graduates\u00a0and are not hurt by\u00a0what had been a\u00a0slightly tougher\u00a0grading system, said Loyola\u2019s law school dean, Victor Gold.<\/p>\n

"We were putting our students unfairly at a competitive disadvantage in an extremely competitive job market," he said in an interview Friday. "We are trying to have a level playing field with other students in the state."<\/p>\n

By changing the letter grade assigned to numeric\u00a0scores, the change raised\u00a0the average GPA of its first-year students from a B-minus to a B.<\/p>\n

The dean said the faculty vigorously debated the plan, knowing that the school risked bad publicity and accusations of grade inflation. But to do nothing, Gold said, would be worse.<\/p>\n

Sure enough,\u00a0criticism\u00a0arrived quickly.\n<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Elie Mystal, co-editor of the legal affairs website Above the Law, blasted the Loyola change.<\/p>\n

"I\u2019m happy \u2014 I\u2019m thrilled, even \u2014 that law school administrations are noticing their graduates cannot get jobs in this economy," Mystal, a Harvard Law School graduate, wrote in a
\nposting.<\/span> "Admitting you have a problem is the first step towards correcting the problem. But of all the things a school might do to help students get jobs, artificially inflating grades retroactively seems like the most shallow and cosmetic \u2018solution\u2019 possible." <\/p>\n

In an e-mail response to questions from The Times, Mystal said he found it particularly unusual that Loyola is retroactively changing the grades for classes back to 2007.<\/p>\n

"All Loyola has done is make sure all the area employers know that those transcripts are artificially inflated. Maybe in a couple of years, employers will forget," he wrote. <\/p>\n

However, Scott Altman, vice dean at USC\u2019s law school, defended changes in grading curves.<\/p>\n

USC\u2019s law school changed its grading system in various ways in the past decade, most recently in 2008 with a small rise in the mean grades for first-year students from 3.2 to 3.3. That was done in part to match changes at UCLA, he said. <\/p>\n

"We didn\u2019t want local or national employers to mistakenly think our students had lower grades than students at comparable schools," he said.<\/p>\n

Altman said he was not familiar with details of Loyola\u2019s plan, but said he assumes it took the steps "in good faith."\u00a0<\/p>\n

"It\u2019s not in their interest to have rampant grade inflation," he said.<\/p>\n

–Larry Gordon<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students at Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles just had their grades adjusted a bit upward without even having to study any harder. The 1,300-student school recently changed its grading curve formula for current students and the last three years of graduates by a third of a grade to match the scales of other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4840,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-506935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4840"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}