- Despite the fact that grades don't predict workplace performance at all, companies still use them to hire people. (Basically because it's a legal way to keep out black people.) Because of this, schools can boost their US News & World Report rank by giving people better grades, since starting salary factors into the rankings in many years.
- Schools are basically run as businesses these days, and that's what the customers want. Asking why schools keep inflating grades is kind of like asking why McDonald's keeps making their chicken nuggets taste so fucking delicious.
-Schools in Africa grade students, who are they trying to keep out?
-Some schools might be run as a business; I think most aren't (they're subpar and inefficient). If they are, they're run as a mom and pop. If San Francisco schools were businesses, they'd have gone bankrupt and displaced a while ago.
The science suggests that if you we're assigned both groups at random, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
There are only a handful of studies because it's considered kind of a dumb question to ask. But Alfie Kohn references some of them in his books, I think in What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated? But the ones that exist consistently show the same thing.
This includes the huge internal study that Google HR did:
"Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people."
"When all this was completed, Dr. Carlisle set about analyzing the two million data points the survey collected. Among the first results was confirmation that Google’s obsession with academic performance was not always correlated with success at the company."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/technology/03google.html?e...
That's what the results found. Google just didn't change their hiring policy accordingly.
Could you apply the principle of charity and think of any other possible reason why employers might care about grades?
Like, I dunno, employers believe grades are correlated with conscientiousness, agreeableness and intelligence, and employers find these traits useful?
If you knew twice as much about the issue, do you think you'd be more or less charitable than you are today?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
It's a far better way to learn from other people than simply assuming they are racist/communist/terrorist and dismissing them.
Now if law schools have a rational argument for why they still use grades to determine who gets into law school even though it has been shown that GPA has zero correlation with ability as a lawyer, and that its main effect is to keep black people out of law school, then I'd love to hear it. But note that they would need a rational reason for doing this, not just any reason.
(Which Malcolm Gladwell talks about here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/gladwe...)
A charitable interpretation of the actions of law school admissions departments would simply be that they don't believe this "fact" (a citation for which is desperately needed).
Further, you are attributing anti-black racism to a group of people (law school admins/profs) who routinely engage in pro-black racism (see, e.g., Grutter v. Bollinger). It doesn't even make sense.
"Finally, the "draft fear" explanation cannot explain why a very similar pattern of grade inflation has occurred over the decades in Canadian universities which were spared the tumult of the Vietnam protest era and student fears that they might be drafted and sent overseas to fight and die."
It has been written about, probably in the Atlantic or NYT, maybe 10 years ago.