[arink]

I had a friend who graduated from University of Iowa law school. If I remember correctly, he told me that everyone had their GPA bumped up by a third because graduates weren't measuring up to other law schools if potential employers filtered by GPA.

Found this at http://www.law.uiowa.edu/documents/2010-11_handbook_web.pdf which would seem to back it up since he was in law school at this time: "In November 2005, the faculty decided to adjust the grading scale and grading curve applicable to the students who entered the College in May 2004 and thereafter. This change included a retroactive adjustment of the grades of students entering in May 2004 or thereafter."

And wikipedia has an article showing a pretty large range with where various law schools set their 50% mark. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_school_GPA_curves

[idoh]

I'm a University of Iowa College of Law graduate (enrolled in 2002, graduated in 2005). When I was there the grading system was quite odd - if I remember correctly the average grade was a 78, and getting something like an 82 would put you in the top 25% of the course. A 90 was the standard highest grade you could get, and scores of up to 92 were reserved for extraordinary achievement.

I'm pretty sure that this system put graduates at a major disadvantage - nobody understood what the grades meant and the career office encouraged us to put some type of explanatory note alongside our transcript. So I'm happy that they made the change, but alas it did not come soon enough for me (the change being transitioning from the numeric system to letters).

I've done a lot of thinking about this subject, and I think that the only fair way to assign grades is just on forced rank in class. Everything else would get gamed (or a school's refusal to game would put the student at an unfair disadvantage).