GPA Inflation: The latest in law school rankings finagling or a legitimate way to help students find work in these troubled times?
 

If anyone has ever questioned how the importance of grades in law school -- especially first-year grades -- they need only look to the latest move by some law schools to make their students and graduates more attractive to prospective employers.  The latest response to the dismal legal hiring market, at least 10 law schools are inflating students' GPAs.  Loyola Law School in Los Angeles most recently jumped on the bandwagon, adding  0.333 to every grade recorded in the past few years. With that, Loyola joins the ranks of schools such as New York University, Georgetown, Tulane and Golden Gate who have already begun artificially inflating their students' grades.

GPA inflation is just one of the many avenues (in addition to paying law firms to hire grads and subsidizing their employment in public interest work) that schools are using to aid their students during these troubled economic times, as well as to shore up their US News Rankings. It is also an answer to the call of grads who originally enrolled with the expectation of being guaranteed a job upon completion of the JD, but who are now faced with the dual challenges of unemployment and staggering student debt.

GPA inflation also falls under a broader category of "grade reform" that many schools are employing to a mixed reaction. While some schools are tacking on extra GPA percentages, some are simply giving out more A's while others such as Harvard are eliminating traditional grading systems in favor of a modified pass/fail system. Many students are in support of the reforms, defending them as a way to stay competitive with students from other schools of comparable rank that are already engaging in such practices. Grade reform is viewed as part of an overall shift in national trends, even in undergraduate institutions.

However, such maneuvers can appear unseemly, especially when considered logically: if every school raises their bottom grades to be on par with their high grads, or even just above average, then the average creeps up, feeding a potentially endless cycle of inflation until all grades are rendered meaningless. Moreover, it isn't known whether this strategy is helping students find jobs, since many large law firms have caught on to the game. “Every year we do our homework,” says Helen Long, the legal recruiting director at Ropes & Gray, a firm with more than 1,000 lawyers. “And besides, if a school had a remarkable jump in its G.P.A.’s from one year to the next, we receive a big enough group of résumés every year that we’d probably notice.”

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