I Really Should Be Packing

But I couldn't resist responding to this comment.

First of all, thanks for the sympathy. Now let's see if we can come to some understanding of my school's GPA policy by talking it out some more.

One of the justifications for the curve is that for a period of time graduates of my school were passing the bar at a very low rate when they first took it - though most were said to have passed it the second time around. A panel was commissioned to look into it and they came up with this 2.2 - 2.4 GPA curve. Apparently there was a correlation between grades and passing the bar.

With a curve this low I see one or two things happening - tell me if there's more - 1) a certain number of people are going to have to have failing grades and/or 2) a majority of the students are going to have to have mediocore grades. Now I have no problem with failing students who deserve to fail a class but I do have a problem when students who have mostly middling grades because of the curve might be forced out of school because they have had done poorly in a class or two. And I think that's what happens when you have a curve - 2.3 - that's so close to the cutoff - 2.0. It could be happenning to a friend of mine who was at a Cum. 1.98 GPA before the final grade came in. If that were his final GPA, he would be forced out of law school because he's below the 2.0 cutoff even though he's only 0.32 - that's less than a third of a grade people! - off the curve where most SWLAW students are bunched around.

And yes, with such a curve, it makes it difficult for a majority of SWLAW students to find a decent job in the legal profession even if the school does send out a letter with our transcripts explaining the curve. That's what pisses off most students but it's those certain students who are forced out of law school - students I believe who could pass the bar - because of the curve that gets to me the most.

Now they do call it a soft curve, in that the professor can always petition to raise - or lower - the curve for a particular class but the petitions rarely, if ever they have, bumped it up significantly above the 2.4 mark.

The whole thing doesn't seem right. Can someone else make sense of it for me?