What To Do When You're Dumped By Your Law School? pt.2

So, to be honest, I'm not that hard. I cried. I cried and cried and cried. Here I am, 46 years old, and I'm what? Pretty much a failure at everything I do. I never had a childhood dream of becoming a lawyer, that's true. But I really thought I had a knack for law, more than anyone else I had known. And through the years I had cultivated this sense of justice. Almost to a fault. I have a really hard time standing by when others are being swindled, bullied, or taken advantage of. I thought that this would be my chance to help others.

But I am one tenacious, bitch. I am not about to go down without a fight.

How GPAs Are Calculated at CWSL

Any of you Cal Western students reading this might want to take notice of this. GPA's are calculated in THE most shady means.

So let's think about grades and how we're used to them being distributed. Your professor is going to look over your assignments, and exams, and she's gonna say, "This student did, OK, I'm gonna give her a B, or, I'm gonna give her an 85%, whatever. And we know that that B is gonna come out to a 3.0 on the GPA scale. That's common knowledge. And this is how they do it in nearly ALL California Law Schools. So, if you're a student at say:

Actually, that's a bad example, let's say you were accepted at:

Another bad example, actually. Stanford and UC Berkeley are both T14 Schools. If you're not sure what a T14 School is, you probably shouldn't be in law school, period.

TOO SOON

Anyway, these are the Top 14 Law Schools in the country:

They're a little "bougey". Most of these schools are too good for A,B,C,D,F grades. (UCLA being the exception - "Fuck yeah for keepin' it real, UCLA!") These schools grade like Honors, Pass, Restricted Credit, an Fail. Don't ask, those people are assholes.

Most other law schools use the same method used in elementary school through graduate school: Your professor assigns a letter grade or a percentage to value your work in the class. We'll call this P. Now whatever P is, be it a letter or number, it gets assigned a number between 0 and 4 usually. But this is a pretty standard format. F=0, D-1, C=2, B=3, and A=4.

BUT NOT CWSL!

Cal Western 's professors assign a number value to a student's achievment. But not a 0-100 percentage. Oh no. That would be too easy, lets make the range between 50-95. Just for shits and giggles. We're gonna call this scale 1. These numbers do reflect a letter grade, with multiple scores equalling the same letter grade. And that's fine, the same thing happens when you convert a percentage score to a letter grade. Like this:

Notice the uniformity of conversion here: Each minus grade (A-, B-, C-, D-) corresponds to a range of 3 percentage points (60-62, etc.) The plain letter grade (A, B, C, D) each have a range of 4 percentage points, and each plus grade has a range of 3 percentage points (except for A+ due to the fact the range includes 100). Each letter grade of D or higher corresponds to 10 percentage points. This is a linear conversion, the values converted from one scale to another are equal, understandable, and predictable.

This is what CWSL;s conversions look like: The minuses correspond to 5 points, 5 points, 3 points, and 3 points for D, C, B, and A respectively. The plain letters correspond to 5 points, 1 point, 5 points, and 3 points for D, C, B, and A. For the plusses there is 4 points, 2 points, 2 points, and 3 points. CWSL's conversion also allows 10 percentage points for each letter grade , but instead of uniformally distributing them it provides 14 points for D's, 8 for C's, 10 for B's, and 9 for A's. AND....only one score for a C, which uncoincidentlly enough, also equates to a 2.0 GPA. This ensures that much more student receive D's than are necessary, very few students receive C's, and a few will get B's and A's.

And before you start screaming, "Nathan, you neaderthal nincompoop, it's cuz of the curve!"

Professors factor in the curve before they assign the scale 1 grade, so can't blame that.

However, letter grades are of no consequence at CWSL. CWSL just assigns letter grades for the benefits of the student. To give us something we recognize. The letter grade itself has no bearing on the GPA. Which could have been CWSL's saving grace. But it's not, so it can't. I'll explain....

GPA CALCULATIONS

To get your GPA, CWSL will take that 50 - 95 score from the professor and multiply it by the number of units the particular course was worth leaving you with your course score, a number between 150-285 for a 3 credit course. Repeat for each class. Add up all the course scores and divide by total number of credits. My Spring 2024 GPA would look like this:

CLASS	SCORE		UNITS	COURSE SCORE	CLASS SCORE
Contracts II	74	x	3	222
Property II	74	x	3	222
Torts I	73	x	3	219
Civil Procedure II	76	x	3	228
Legal Skills II	83	x	3	249	Spring  GPA
			15	1140	= 76

For those of you who have gotten bored and lost the thread, THIS IS WHERE CWSL MESSED UP! They use that same uneven letter grade conversion from above, but instead, substitute the letter grade for numbers along the 0.00-4.33 GPA scale (scale 2). They just add a few more decimal places:

scale 1 scale 2

So...just like CWSL's scale 1 to numerical grades are all jacked and unfair, so is this one. The system will give much more student D's than are necessary, very few students receive C's, and a few will get B's and A's.

Because the professors give students numerical scores based upon values that increase uniformally, then the resulting values in scale 2 should also increase in uniform values. In this case, every one point on scale 1 should equal 0.108 in scale 2. But it don't.

SOMETHING OBVIOUS CAUGHT MY EYE

My Spring 2024 GPA is what led me to investigate CWSL's grading practice. My scale 1 GPA was 76.00, which, in the Student Handbook, doesn't give me an exact number - I just know that numbers between 75.00-76.99 have GPAs between 2.12 and 2.41. But the next block tells me that 77.00-79.99 have GPAs between 2.42-2.79. Well 76 is exactly between 75 and 77, so my GPA should be exactly between 2.12 and 2.42. (2.12+2.42)/2=2.27. Yet, I received a 2.25 GPA. "Well that was easy" I'm thinking to myself. A 1.73 GPA in the Fall with a 2.27 GPA in the Spring is a 2.00 cumulative GPA. (1.73+2.27)/2=2.00. Surely that See You Next Tuesday, Hannah Brenner Johnson will see the simple error and correct it.

Or not.--------------------------------->

H.B.J. is almost right. It was calculated according to their method of calculations, but "garbage in, garbage out". Just because you have a flawed and shitty method, doesn't mean it's right. And notice she doesn't describe the process of how the numbers are translated.

WHO SAYS STUDENTS OF LAW DON'T KNOW MATH?

If you paid attention during Statistics or Linear Algebra in your undergrad, you'll know that there is a formula that one can use to determine what the value of one number within a certain range would be in another range: y=c+(x-a)*(d-c)/(b-a) where y is the unknown value, x is the known value, a is the minimum value on the old scale, b is the maximum value on the old scale, c is the minimum value of the new scale, and d is the maximum value of the new scale. Because there are many scale 1 values that equal 0.00 on scale 2, we're going to use the minimum value of scale 1 that equals something other than 0.00. That number is 55.00. So, a=55.00 and c=0.01. b=95.00 and d=4.33

THIS IS A LINEAR TRANSFORMATION FORMULA. So, despite what Vice Dean claims, my Spring scale 1 GPA of 76 should be 2.278. 2.28, not 2.25, not 2.27. The reason for the previous score of 2.27 is, again, "garbage in, garbage out". The numbers published in the Student Handbook are still arbitrary. My cumulative GPA of 73.9 then equals 2.0512, not 1.98. Those 0.07 points may seem like nothing if you're rocking a 3.5 GPA, but when you're right at 2.0-ish, It means everything.

MATH IS NOT SUBJECTIVE

So I take the Vice Dean's advice and head over to the registrar's office to bitch. Armed with my knowledge of linear algebra and I head to the Admin Building, I sneak past Cerebrus's Office

"I DON'T HAVE THE EQUATION, THIS WAS MADE WAY BEFORE I STARTED HERE."

I speak to Jerome Thompson at the Registrar's Office and he starts off talking about curves and how GPAs are calculated and assures me it was done correctly. I ask him to show me the math. Show me how the scale 1 numbers are converted into scale 2 numbers. He busts out this printed out spreadsheet with the complete set of numbers from scale 1 in one column and the corresponding scale 2 numbers in the column next to it. I tell him that that's not showing me the math, just the outcomes. If this was high school trig, he'd only be getting partial credit, He says to me, "I don't have the equation, this was made way before I started here." "Are you fucking shitting me!?" I ask. So one person's crappy math skills long ago have been artificially dismissing student, and no one's bothered to look into it?? Before I leave his office I ask if I could have a copy of that spreadsheet... "I'd have to check with Dean Johnson, but it shouldn't be a problem. I'll email you." I haven't heard shit.

APPEAL

So this whole time Dean Brenner and I have been exchanging emails and they've been getting a little more, shall we say, tense. At some point she basically says me getting kicked out of CWSL was because I was a shitty student and maybe, down the road, I'll realize that and stop blaming other people for the problems in my life. HA! Like I'd EVER stop blaming others for the problems in my life. In one of her earlier, more polite emails, she mentioned that minus a mathematical error, the dismissal was not appealable. Well, this is a mathematical error so I appealed to the Academic Affairs Committee. Of CWSL, Which I'm sure probably only consists of her. And what do you think their good news was?

Well, I guess that's it.

I mean, not much else I can do.

Except sue the fuck out of 'em....

....TO BE CONTINUED

I almost forgot about CWSL's possible saving grace... So, if CWSL would have kept the letter grades as instrumental in the GPA calculations, then this whole thing would be moot. If they just would take that letter grade and assign it to a score, ANY score really, in scale 2, then they wouldn't have to justify having or not having linear transformation. They could then just say this is how we convert letters to numbers and they'd be straight. BUT. When you start converting numbers to numbers in a way that defies accepted mathematics, then you run into some issues.