Laura Drake
Grade inflation in U.S. law schools
Getting a .333 boost to your grades might make you feel good for half a second — but that’s literally all it will do
When I was studying for the LSAT last year, I started to drive everyone around me a little bananas by viewing all utterings as potential exam questions and therefore subject to complete logical scrutiny. I’ve stopped since then, and I think I managed to retain most of my friends, but occasionally something will pop up in real life that makes so little sense that I can’t help but saying something like “Oh man, if that was a logical reasoning question, it would be an easy one.”
And when those logical bloopers come from law schools themselves, the very schools one is required to write the LSAT for, it makes the conundrums extra head scratchy. Like this:
One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.
But it’s not because they are all working harder.
The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.
Getting a legal education in the United States is expensive. Really, really expensive. And finding a job as a lawyer in America right now is really, really hard – between February 2009 and February 2010, the American legal sector lost 37,100 positions.
So if you’re a new law school grad, six figures in debt and facing nothing but cricket chirps and tumbleweeds when passing out your resume, getting a .333 boost to your grades might make you feel good for half a second — until you realize that if everyone’s grades are increased by the exact same amount then your position relative to your classmates hasn’t changed one iota. Moreover, your positioning relative to people from other schools has seen no real change either, since stories are published every time this happens and potential employers can just subtract the amount of the increase off, leaving you exactly where you were in the first place: six figures in debt for a degree from a law school that employs the kind of logic that would get a failing grade on the test you needed to take to get into that school in the first place.
No I won’t be a family lawyer
Too many squabbling spouses
In my waning days as a crime reporter, one of my favourite things to do upon encountering a homicide detective was to tell them that I was leaving journalism to go to law school and then, when they asked me what kind of law I wanted to practice, tell them I wanted to be a defence lawyer. Some of them actually swore at me, while others managed to restrain themselves to turning purple. Oh, the fun we had.
While my response was a joke it was sort of premised on the good ol’ “cops-don’t-like-defence-lawyers” assumption, in a way, the bigger joke is asking any incoming law student what kind of lawyer they’re planning to be.
Most incoming law students have vague notions of what kind of law we think we’re interested in: environmental, business, tax, whatever. Truthfully, in my case, I do think I want to go into criminal law of some kind, but asking someone before they even start law school what kind of lawyer they want to be is kind of like asking a kid in middle school what they want to be when they grow up, in that perceptions of an occupation are drawn not from its study or practice, but mostly from having observed it from the outside somehow.
As I was handily reminded in an e-mail today from UVic law, first-year law students have less than no choice in the courses they take. I don’t know what it’s like at other schools, but I don’t even get the tiniest say in my schedule, it’s going to be all picked out for me. In second and third year there’s more choice but by then, presumably, first-year classroom experiences will have a much bigger influence on course selection than the vague notions I currently hold about different types of law.
But then again, maybe not. If there’s one kind of law that I can’t imagine myself practicing, ever, it’s family law. One of the last stories I worked on as a reporter was a bizarre house explosion in Edmonton’s north end. The couple who lived in the house, both of whose bodies were found when the wreckage cleared, had a long and acrimonious court history, an excellent summary of which can be found here. On the day we got the hundreds of pages of court filings this couple had made against one another, I spent hours sitting at my desk reading the heinous accusations each levelled against the other over the course of months. It was literally gut wrenching to read and I found myself physically anxious and nauseated for the rest of the day, simply from reading court transcripts. On the back of each of these, in a cute little sans-serif font, was a stamp with the words “The Family Law Centre,” with a little four-person stick figure family smiling out from the middle.
So, no family law for me. And, according to this story, even though the profession surely has noble aspects, apparently not much in law school or the real world is poised to change the mind of anyone not drawn to the field:
Lawyers who practise family law say it’s a rewarding job that helps people solve problems. But for an increasing number of lawyers, negative perceptions of the field — that it only involves squabbling spouses, bitter custody disputes, and dividing meagre assets — appear to be pushing them toward work that seems quieter, safer, and more lucrative.
Hey, you’re going to be a lawyer, take a look at this
First-year lecture halls aren’t filled with legal experts, they’re filled with people as doused with nervous sweat as I presume I’ll be
I started thinking about going to law school almost exactly two years ago. At the time, I was working as the court reporter for the Ottawa Citizen and was starting to find the fit between myself and journalism a bit off. At the same time, I was being paid to observe the daily lives of Ottawa’s criminal lawyers and, as so frequently happens when anyone starts to become disenchanted with something, the next most proximate alternative started to look seriously appealing. I did love going to the courthouse each day and observing all manner of trials, so eventually it just made sense to set myself on a path to actually practice law myself, instead of being employed as a constant observer.
Fast forward through the LSAT prep and the test writing and the score release and the application process and the waiting for the acceptances and the acceptances and all the other gauntlets that literally every other potential law student faces, gauntlets not insignificant but not particularly important right now, and I was at the point where I started to tell people that I was leaving journalism and going to law school. At which point, a strange and panic-inducing phenomenon started cropping up in my life: people started treating me like I was already a lawyer.
Not all the time, obviously, and no one was hiring me to take their cases or anything, because I don’t know anyone that criminally stupid. But as soon as people heard I was quitting to go to law school, friends and colleagues started asking me my opinion on various legal issues that would crop up in the news. At one point, my editor at the Edmonton Journal, the last place I worked, dropped some parole documents that had come in on my desk and asked me to look over them. Now, I was a crime reporter at the Journal, so reading parole docs was a regular part of my job, but on this particular occasion he specifically asked me to do it because I was going to be a lawyer.
All of these tiny incidents, even if it was just being introduced to a new person as “This is Laura, she’s going to be a lawyer,” has sent me into the same paroxyms of fear and has inspired a lightning-fast soliloquy from me that goes something like this:
“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t think we should say that I’m going to be a lawyer. I mean, yes, I’m going to law school in the fall. I did get into law school, that is true. But I mean, right now, I’m not even there yet. I don’t even have a class schedule. And then I have to pass, like, all my first year classes. And second, and third. And between those years, I have to get jobs that are related to the law. And then after that, after all that, I have to article and pass the bar and…”
And then I would sort of pass out or curl up into a tiny, sweating, hyperventilating ball.
What scares me about all these weird interactions was not the reminder of the metric ton of work I’m facing in the next three years or the distant, looming title of lawyer, the one that comes with many derisive looks and lame jokes. It’s the idea that, because I’ve decided to go to law school, I should already know a bunch about the law. It’s the same feeling I had as a 17-year-old on the first day of Journalism school, when I looked around the lecture theatre at Carleton that held more people than my hometown and was convinced that every other 17-year-old there had already edited a newspaper or scribed a Globe and Mail focus piece or was a direct descendent of William Randolph Hearst.
I was wrong then, and I’m pretty sure I’m wrong now. First-year lecture halls aren’t filled with legal experts, they’re filled with people as doused with nervous sweat as I presume I’ll be. The internet is filled with discussion threads of panicked people in my position asking upper-year law students what the best things to read in the pre-law school summer are, and the answers are almost universally the same: nothing. Relax. The next three years will be filled with law books and case briefs, so take this time to do nothing.
So, okay. I’ll try to relax. I’ll be okay.
I think
