Thanksgiving is a stressful time for many people, but especially for law students. Thanksgiving for most people starts a month or so of excessive spending, excessive eating, and excessive time with people we really don’t care for, medicated by excessive alcohol. For law students, it means the start of finals, which means excessive work, excessive coffee, and insufficient sleep and nutrition.

But it isn’t just the material that causes this. Law students hate finals because of something different, but related. Jansen explains:

What makes law school finals stressful is not the material, but the curve. Our grades are not based on what we know, but on how much more we know than our equally-competent peers.

Jansen echoed similar sentiments a couple weeks ago:

During my run, I realized that I am only irritable in my easy classes. The problem I have with easy classes is the curve. Easy classes mean arbitrary grading because everyone understands the material. The difference between an A and a C is usually something obscure or even the format of the answer (instead of the content.)

Jansen’s two points are essential to the law student trying to understand finals. To get through finals with your health and sanity intact, you need to accept something early on, understand what it means, and move on:

You are at the mercy of the curve.

What Curves Look Like
Curves in law school have two dimensions. The first is what the curve is set at. This is the average grade for the class that the curve is supposed to generate. For most law schools, it will be something between a 2.7 and a 3.3 (B- to B+).

The second dimension of the curve is how tight it is. Another way to ask this is how many people get grades at or near the median that the curve is based on. On a 3.0 (B) curve, does everyone get B- through B+ and almost no A’s or C’s, or are there lots of A’s and C’s and fewer B’s? On a graph of the distribution of grades, this would be how tall and steep the peak is.

What Curves Mean

Imagine you’re at a school where the curve for classes is a 2.7 – 3.3. The curve is ostensibly around a 3.0, but professors have latitude to go up or down a little. I think this is fairly common and it has the added benefit of being the system I am most familiar with.

If you have a class with a 2.7 curve and a very wide distribution, this represents both opportunity and fear. You have fear because the professor starts out on the low end of the curve and gives lots of C’s to boot. You have opportunity because the professor has to balance that with lots of A-’s.

If you have a class with a 3.3 curve and a very tight distribution, you may commence banging your head on the wall. That professor will likely give almost everyone a B+, with a few A’s and a smattering of Bs and B-’s. Your grade here is likely set in stone with little to know wiggle room.

What You Should Do
Say you are faced with these two classes, just these two classes, and no other variables like the difficulty of the class or the quality of your fellow students (normally not a variable). How do you approach it?

Spend more time on the first class and comparatively less on the second. Obviously you need to study for both exams. Any law student who claims to show up and just get A’s is either lying about their grades or sandbagging.

But it pays more to spend extra time on the first class than the second. Spending more time on the second looks like a good deal because you are already that much closer to an A before you even start the test. But the reality is that it’s going to take an almost superhuman effort to break out of that curve for a really good grade. More likely is that you’ll get a B or a B+, right around the median.

In the first class, there’s more downside risk and upside potential. Yes, statistically, you are more likely to get a lower grade. But without any other variables, you also have a better chance of getting an A in that class since the A’s need to balance out the Cs.

Before finals come, take some time to think about grading and curves and distribution before you plan out study time. It can help you to focus your efforts where you will be rewarded the most. But also remember that the curve is just one variable in a test. Don’t focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.

This was just part one. Next time, we’ll get to the real core of the problem with curves by looking at two other variables: the ease of the class and the quality of the students.