Afternoon quickies

Workout notes I got in a 51 minute 4 mile walk on the treadmill prior to going out to our fallen cherry tree and hacking at it. Now only a tall-ish stump remains standing; I now have to gather the sticks, etc.

Altruistic Behavior in Animals

Education: Talk about grade inflation:

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average.
But it’s not because they are all working harder.

The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.

Law schools seem to view higher grades as one way to rescue their students from the tough economic climate — and perhaps more to the point, to protect their own reputations and rankings. Once able to practically guarantee gainful employment to thousands of students every year, the schools are now fielding complaints from more and more unemployed graduates, frequently drowning in student debt.

I’d be surprised if some undergraduate institutions didn’t start doing this.

I understand; people want to compare grades at one institution versus another. I think that the University of Chicago Law School has a good solution:

One notable school has managed to maintain the integrity of its grades through an idiosyncratic grading rubric. The University of Chicago Law School grades its students on a scale of 155-186, a system so bizarre that employers are unlikely to try to match it against the 4.0 scale or letter grades used almost everywhere else.

I’d vote for that: let each school grade on some wacky scale.

Current Events If you are a general, you still can’t openly disrespect the Commander in Chief.

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