[btilly]

What I would think better is that law schools get grades normalized according to how their students do in the bar exam.

There should be an external organization that can collect grades and retroactively adjust them according to this principle. Any law school that refused to participate should be rightly viewed with suspicion.

The point is that it doesn't matter what the scale is. Just that it be comparable between schools.

[bradleyjg]

The bar exam has little to nothing to do with what's taught in law school. Virtually everyone takes a six week, several thousand dollar cram course to prepare for the bar. Passing is a factor of how seriously you take this cram course and raw intelligence. Both of these factors are predictable before even starting law school -- the first corresponds roughly to undergraduate GPA (adjusted if necessary for major), the second to LSAT score. The only other major confounding factor is that those who have English as a second language tend to fare poorly, even when taking the normal predictors into account.

More prestigious schools don't have better outcomes because they are better at teaching, they have better outputs because they start with better inputs. The market for lawyers knows this quite well, and if anything overweights it. So there is no need to double up on the signal via differential grades.

[niels_olson]

And there should be a federal section of the bar that is the same across all jurisdictions, and that is what grading should be normalized against.

[jforman]

There is a common portion called the MBE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_examination#Multistate_Bar_...

However, as mentioned in another comment, what you learn in law school and what you need to learn to pass the Bar exam have relatively little overlap.