South Texas College of Law Annotations (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 38, No. 2, Ed. 1, October, 2005 Page: 5 of 8
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October 2005
Page 5
Does the First Year Leave You Behind the Curve?
Grade Deflation at STCL
By S. Colin Mabrlto
Staff Writer
Of all the concerns at
the forefront of a
South Texas
student's mind (is Yamamoto
really the only professor
teaching Federal Income Tax
next semester?); none is more
universally present than GPA.
a thing as grade deflation? If
so, what is it? Largely, I
haven't heard academics
mention this concept, so I'm
unsure if a formal definition
exists. However, I under-
stand the term to refer to
schools awarding lower av-
erage grades to their students
than other competing
schools. Inevitably the con-
cept itself is based in relative
If you've listened to debates
about the merits and
deficiencies of different law
schools, chances are you've
heard the term
"grade inflation" thrown
around at least once.
But would the law school
you pay tens of thousands of
dollars a year to attend be ac-
tively attempting to put you
at a disadvantage in the job
market when you graduate ?
The answer, thankfully,
seems to be no.
Dean Pilkenton explains
that decisions on policies like
the first year suggested curve
are generally governed by fac-
ulty committee decisions,
though in rare cases the ad-
ministration could step in and
facilitate a change. She also
said she knows of no propos-
als in the works to change the
grading system at this point.
This means that the faculty
has considered this issue (bal-
ancing grades with consider-
ations like bar passage rate)
and has decided it is in
everyone's best interest not to
change the grading system at
STCL.
Dean Pilkenton also
stresses that the first year
curve is only recommended,
not required. So grades are
largely up to the individual
professor's discretion and are
collectively thought to be ap-
propriate by the faculty. In a
vacuum, the question is an-
swered. There is no active
grade deflation at STCL. In
the real world, though, we
compete against students
from other law schools in the
job market.
If you've listened to de-
bates about the merits and de-
ficiencies of different law
schools, chances are you've
heard the term "grade infla-
tion" thrown around at least
once. It usually comes up as
a criticism of schools or even
classes that award compara-
tively high average grades to
their students. Is there such
terms. Grade deflation could
be active or merely compara-
tive.
As stated above, there is
no evidence that faculty or
the administration are actively
participating in grade defla-
tion, but comparative grade
deflation can be an effect of
rising GPA's at other schools.
Rather than actively lower-
ing the average grade given
to students, the school fails
to keep up with other
schools' trend toward giving
higher average grades. In-
herent in the concept of
grade deflation is the require-
ment of grade inflation at
competing institutions. So
this begs the question: is
there grade inflation at other
law schools?
As you talk to friends
who attend other Texas law
schools, you begin to won-
der how it is that 100% of
every other law school's stu-
dent body seems to be in the
top 50% of their class. Your
somewhat rusty knowledge
of statistics and mathemati-
cal logic tell you that it isn't
possible, and that there must
be a bottom half of the class
at every law school.
Well, your instincts are
correct, and in fact, 1/2 of
all students enrolled in one
of the nine ABA accredited
Texas law schools are in the
bottom 1/2 of their class. But
how can you reconcile this
with the anecdotal evidence
that you don't know anyone
at another law school with a
GPA under a 3.0? The an-
swer could be grade inflation.
Let's take two law
schools that feed heavily into
the Houston legal job mar-
ket, South Texas and UT.
Compare a first year class
that both institutions require,
Civil Procedure for example.
In the Spring of 2005, each
school had a Civil Procedure
course, covering presumably'
similar material. First, let's
look at the top of the class at
STCL. Section A of Civil
Procedure had a slightly
higher average GPA than sec-
tion B, so we'll use section A
for the comparison. Of 90
Students, 1% made an A+,
4% made an A, and 3% made
anA-. Congratulations guys,
you did a bang-up job.
Now lets look at how UT
students fared in Civ Pro.
Lets take "Professor
Woolley's" class. "Big-
Wool" had 103 students last
semester. Of those students,
4.85% made an A+, 17.48%
made anA, and 15.53% made
anA-. I'dsay congrats... but
it doesn't seem that hard to
do. Approximately 37.76%
of these students made some
kind of an A in Civil Proce-
dure. This is as opposed to
STCL, where 8% of our stu-
dents received any kind of an
A.
But, let's be honest, not
everyone makes it into the A
category. Maybe they have
a lot of high grades and a lot
of low grades, so it all bal-
ances out. First, the bottom
of the class here at STCL;
8% of students made a C-,
6% made a D+, 1% made a
D, and 2% made an F. This
means that a higher percent-
age of students at STCL made
a grade of C- or lower (17%),
than made an A- or better
Compare to the bottom
of the class at UT. I mean,
flunking out is flunking out
at any law school, no matter
how fancy, right? The an-
swer is: we'll never know.
That's because out of three
sections of Civil Procedure
classes, not one student of the
306 enrolled failed Civil Pro-
cedure at the University of
Texas in the Spring of 2005.
This still doesn't neces-
sarily prove that UT partici-
pates in grade inflation. One
could certainly argue that stu-
dents at UT this spring were
much more procedurally in-
clined than STCL students
were. Also, UT is only one
of nine Texas law schools
giving out grades. But at a
time when average GPA's are
on the rise and curves are
being re-centered at many
law schools, it is astonishing
to examine how large of a dis-
parity can exist between simi-
lar classes at two different
schools.
Who really cares about
GPA's anyways? Employers.
That's the ultimate issue here:
if grades are higher at law
school A than law school B,
doesn't a student from A
have a better shot at a job
than a student from B? As
with all answers in law
school, it depends. It depends
because many recruiters
know what the current grade
scales and rankings for each
law school are.
Our career services office
supplies employers participat-
ing in fall recruiting with a
fact-sheet that shows our
class rankings and corre-
sponding grade point average
cut-offs. However, many
students go beyond the for-
malized fall recruiting process
Continued on page 6
UT grade statistics for Spring 2005 are from:
http://www.utexas.edu/law/depts/sao/freshlawdist052.pdf
South Texas grade statistics for Spring 2005 are from:
http://www.stcl.edu/registrar/registrarl/
Spring%202005%20Grade%20Statistics.pdf
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Granberry, Afton. South Texas College of Law Annotations (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 38, No. 2, Ed. 1, October, 2005, newspaper, October 2005; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth144570/m1/5/?q=%22%22~1: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting South Texas College of Law.