June 1, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Professor Volokh writes about the
Professor Volokh writes about the curve at UCLA law school. Is it fair? Well, I have some experience in the area; the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business had a mandatory curve to a ceiling of 3.25. Professors could distribute this in any way they liked -- or as we liked to say, every C subsidized an A for someone else.
Broadly, I'd guess it was fair, although I had some very pungent words for one of my professors who deprived me of an A by deciding to curve to a 3.0 -- I was one point lower than the lowest A.
Of course, there were always people who complained when an absurdly easy test, or class, meant that everyone below a 97 or 98 average got a B. That happened to almost everyone at least once. On the other hand, I didn't see them complaining when the curve lifted their substandard performance up to B level. I'm pretty sure it evened out in the end. And grade inflation is a problem; at Northwestern, down the road from us, rumor had it that the average GPA was a 3.8 or 3.9. At that point, grades are no longer useful information -- why bother giving them? Unless you're a total screw-up, you're getting an A. This isn't uncommon at Business schools, which put us in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain to interviewers who hadn't attended Chicago why my 3.6 was really more impressive than a Northwestern grad with a 3.8 -- but other than that, really not a big deal. So while ideally I think it would be nice to have an objective, fairly difficult standard that you need to reach, in a world of essays and case studies, you need some quasi-objective way to make grading fair. It's certainly fairer than the alternative: my professor's average grade is a C, yours is an A- -- and both of us have to compete for the same job.
Posted by Jane Galt at June 1, 2002 6:39 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links