On Law School Curves, Part Two: The Students

This is the second in a series about law school curves. Read part one here.

Yesterday in the first part of this series, I took a look at just the curve itself and what it might mean when you approach finals. The gist is that when a class is on the high end of the curve and/or the grades are narrowly distributed, it can lead to a lot of banging of your head against the wall and require superhuman effort to get a very good grade.

Now it’s time to start throwing variables in. The first is the quality of the students.

But I Thought All The Students Were the Same?

I think Jansen is mostly right when he refers to law students as his “equally-competent peers.” At least at first.

At your average Tier 1 or Tier 2 school, the students are pretty equal when they walk through the door. In terms of raw intellectual firepower, everyone is on pretty equal footing. This is due to the fact that most Tier 1 and 2 schools are admitting people in the top 10% of LSAT takers, and most people tend to apply to schools in narrow bands based on rankings and admission requirements.

As an example, someone with a 3.7 GPA and a 165 LSAT is likely going to apply to a few reaches in the T14, a number of target schools ranked 15-30, and a few safeties in the 30-40 range. As soon as that person gets that LSAT score, the universe of law schools they might go to is reduced to about 30 or 40. Multiple that by a couple hundred members of an incoming class (minus a few outliers) and you get very similar students.

How All Students Are Not the Same

Once law school starts though, students begin to differentiate themselves. Right off the bat, you see this based on the time of the class. If you have an 8:00 am class where attendance isn’t taken, there will be a group of students, even 1Ls, who stop coming fairly soon. Despite what those students think, not going to class hurts you. Maybe it doesn’t hurt you a lot, but it always does, at least a little bit.

As you get to be a 2L, you start to see people branch out into different activities and different areas of study. If you have a group of students who are targeting criminal prosecution, their interest and desire in Corporations isn’t going to be as high as someone who wants to be a transactional firm attorney. And someone who was a great study as a 1L is going to be handicapped if they are also working on a law journal and doing moot court.

As a 3L, it gets even more stark. Interests and activities are even more diverse. You have a group of students who simply don’t care. And you have a group of students who are desperately fighting to hit a certain percentile like top 10% or top 25%.

How This Affects The Curve

The more homogenous the students are, the tighter the curve will be and the more likely that students might move a professor’s traditional curve. Take for instance a 1L Criminal Law course in the fall semester held at 10:30 am with a very standard distribution of grades around a 3.0 curve. Most students in that class are going to bring their A-games to it. Everyone will be there almost every day and as 1Ls in their first semester, most will be very engaged.

That class has the potential to have a tighter-than-normal distribution. If the tests come back very similar, the professor may avoid hanging C’s on some students for arbitrary differences and instead may keep most everyone to the B range.

Contrast that with a Criminal Procedure class held at 8:00 am in the spring semester because a section was added for 3Ls as a bar review course when it was traditionally a 2L course in the fall held during the afternoon. You can throw out any previous grade distributions in that course. It will likely be all over the map and I’m betting lower than normal.

This is just one variable among quite a few when dealing with how a curve will fall. And it’s one variable among quite a few more when deciding how to approach a class. It’s still something law students should be aware of.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the difficulty of the classes, the core of the original post.

Tagged as: curve, finals