Grades????

[T. Durden]

aye yes this is very true

a bit brash me was me thinks

i'll pretend for now that things wont' change for the worse

[artgirl]

Have any of you guys heard about people doing drastically different in terms of first semester and second semester grades? Do people generally stay around the class ranking they are in throughout school? 

[nate]

i've heard that (at least at my school) there is quite a bit of flopping around.

now i'm sure it's not to the level of those who got straight As first semester are getting straight Cs next semester, or vice versa- when you're in one of those positions you're probably doing something exactly right or something wrong. but it seems like almost everyone has a lower grade at some point in their first year, and i've been told by quite a few people that their grades went up by almost an entire letter (ex B- --> A-).

EDIT: i wanted to add that i just found out last night that a friend of mine went from getting Ds and low Cs her first year, to almost straight As her second. granted, this is much different from making a similar improvement during your second semester (when grades are arguably much more important), but it shows it can be done.

[tjking82]

3.2 just seems ridiculously high. i'm at 3.0 right now (praying it will only go up), and according to the handbook that's a "with honors" gpa. so basically, about 60% of the class is in "with honors" standing. crazy.

Generally the higher ranked schools keep higher medians.  This is often justified by the semi-flawed thought process "since all our students would be achieving higher grades at other law schools, we can afford to give them higher grades here."

Hence the phenomenon of everyone at Harvard undergrad getting an A.

[T. Durden]

yeah we haev a 3.25 mean

it's official

[norm012001]

At GW, do you have any idea what the GPA cutoffs were for the scholar designations in past semester?

[T. Durden]

no idea with regards to GPA

top 25% are GW scholars

top 10% are thursgood marshall scholars

(i think)

[norm012001]

Yeah, they told us the percentages, just thought people might know the vicinity of the GPA that got it in the past.  I think the way they broke it down for us was

GW Scholar - top 15%

Thurgood Marshal Scholar - top 35% (I assume that this is really 16-35%)

[lincolnsgrandson]

Norm - just thought I'd use this space to say that I agree with you about why so many lawyers are depressed.  That is, I hypothesize that the reasons so many lawyers get burnt out and depressed is that they have come straight from college to law school.  So many have never had experience in high pressure work environments. I don't know if the theory is true, though.