It's not about the grades

The Times has a story today on the trend in law schools to change their grading systems to inflate student GPAs, often retroactively, and make students more marketable. At FIU, we just changed our system (although not retroactively) by eliminating the mean and reworking the distribution.

But grades aside, the end of the story captures what is really important in getting a job:

James Wagner, the hiring partner at the 29-lawyer Boston firm Conn Kavanaugh Rosenthal Peisch & Ford, said he hadn’t noticed any grade inflation in the last couple of years. But he has noticed something else new from applicants.

“About a third to half of the résumés I’ve been getting now profess a love of the Red Sox,” he chuckles, wondering if the students had been coached by their schools.

“But I’ll bet that if you compared résumés for those same candidates,” he says, “when they apply to New York firms they love the Yankees, and for Chicago firms, it’s the Cubs.”