How difficult is keeping a B+ Average?

[lawyerdude]

Hello all, 

I was awarded a renewable entrance scholarship today and will have to keep a B+ Average each year. I am wondering how difficult this will be at OZ as well as any insight into the grading system (is it scaled, or a function of class rank etc). 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated! 

[LMP]

The difficulty will depend on your ability. The grading is curved and only a certian number of people are permitted to get each letter grade. A B+ average would probably put you in the top third, possibly the top quater. 

This also means that the realative strength of your section will determine what letter grade your raw marks turn into. 

 

[GoatDuck]

Not sure how the math works at the scale of the entire year’s average gpa, but at the scale of an individual class, you’d have to be at least in the top 35% of the given class to get a B+. You can get Cs and still maintain a B+ average, provided you get some As, but I suspect you’d have to be better than approximately 65% of your peers to get a B+ average in your first year. 

[scooter]

Overall B+ average at Osgoode is top 50% ish, no? 

https://www.osgoode.yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Grade-Profiling-Sheet-2021-2022.pdf

[multilingualcat]

4 minutes ago, scooter said:

Overall B+ average at Osgoode is top 50% ish, no? 

https://www.osgoode.yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Grade-Profiling-Sheet-2021-2022.pdf

wait.. people actually get Fs at Osgoode?! Like at least 1 in every class?

[scooter]

That screenshot is of overall averages/GPAs for the 2021-22 school year, not the grading curve for an individual class. It shows that one person in each of 1L/2L/3L had an F average that year. I just screenshotted that year because it's the most recent year in the linked PDF. Some other years have 0 people with an F average and some have 1-2. I imagine that there would probably need to be some extenuating circumstances for you to get an F average across the entire school year.

Disclaimer that I don't go to Osgoode, I am just basing this off the linked PDF

[omigone]

Since you're going to Oz, roughly 50% of students will have a B+ average or higher in 1L (as posted above). The number shoots up to 63% of students for each of your 2L and 3L years. This might seem odd because only roughly 20% can get B+ grades and 15% can get A-range grades. The discrepancy is that Oz has lower requirements for cGPA than individual course grades. 

On our whacky 9 point grading scheme,  B = 6.0 and B+ = 7.0. However, a B+ cGPA is between 6.5-7.5 based on all the courses you've taken. So in reality, if you have a few B+'s and some B grades, it's enough to maintain a B+ average, even though you didn't get at least a B+ in every class. 

Edited February 1 by omigone

[CleanHands]

3 hours ago, lawyerdude said:

Hello all, 

I was awarded a renewable entrance scholarship today and will have to keep a B+ Average each year. I am wondering how difficult this will be at OZ as well as any insight into the grading system (is it scaled, or a function of class rank etc). 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated! 

@BlockedQuebecoishas been pretty open about doing a lot better than a B+ average putting in no effort other than looking over someone else's CAN 5 minutes before any given exam.

For others it is literally impossible for them to achieve a B+ average regardless of technique or effort.

It's hard to overstate the extent to which nobody can answer this for you (aside from providing statistical information about what percentile of students achieves what grade, but that doesn't say anything about you personally).

[MyWifesBoyfriend]

11 hours ago, CleanHands said:

It's hard to overstate the extent to which nobody can answer this for you (aside from providing statistical information about what percentile of students achieves what grade, but that doesn't say anything about you personally).

Since we're on the topic of grades and performance in law school, how correlative is LSAT score to law school success in your experience? 

Edited February 1 by MyWifesBoyfriend

[BlockedQuebecois]

They're correlated insofar as not being an idiot is correlated with both doing okay on the LSAT and doing okay in law school. 

Law school performance is a crap shoot that is only weakly correlated with both undergraduate grades and the LSAT, so there's no real point in trying to predict how well you will do. 

[CleanHands]

53 minutes ago, MyWifesBoyfriend said:

Since we're on the topic of grades and performance in law school, how correlative is LSAT score to law school success in your experience? 

Statistically the LSAT is more correlated with law school success than any other factor taken into account in admissions, which is still not much.

Anecdotally I achieved a 99th percentile LSAT almost effortlessly and still had to work to achieve above average law school grades.

 

 

[SummerhillGirl]

51 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

Statistically the LSAT is more correlated with law school success than any other factor taken into account in admissions, which is still not much.

 

 

 

Maybe not so much in relation to the highlighted bit above and below? From U of T's website:

Holistic Approach
From the 2015-2016 admission year, the algorithm that assigns the two-thirds weighting to the Academic Record and LSAT was adjusted in a way that grants more weight to the GPA, since new data reveals that the GPA merits relatively more weight in predicting performance in first year than other factors.

 

 

@MyWifesBoyfriend

Edited February 1 by SummerhillGirl

[WiseGhost]

One thing to keep in mind about the LSAT as a metric is that it often reflects someone's performance on a good day because many people take the test more than once. Practice can also make it a poorer measurement of inherent ability. A student who studies for months to get a 165 is likely not as gifted as the student who gets that score on their first practice test. GPA is also imperfect because some programs are much harder than others, and choosing easier courses can result in an inflated GPA. 

In short, both GPA and LSAT are imperfect. They have predictive value on an aggregate level, but law school performance is all about the individual (and a bit of luck). My view is that the most important qualities for law school success are hard work, analytical skills, and writing ability. If @lawyerdude has those qualities, betting on placing in the top 50% of the class isn't crazy. 

[Dinsdale]

Slightly OT, but you can see why BigLaw doesn't really recruit below a B+ average if 40% of the class is achieving that metric!

[HeyItsJay02]

On 1/31/2024 at 6:43 PM, lawyerdude said:

Hello all, 

I was awarded a renewable entrance scholarship today and will have to keep a B+ Average each year. I am wondering how difficult this will be at OZ as well as any insight into the grading system (is it scaled, or a function of class rank etc). 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated! 

Hey, I was wondering how they let you know you received an entrance scholarship. I have been accepted to Osgoode for a little bit and applied for them. Did they email you or did you check online somewhere? Thanks.

[MyWifesBoyfriend]

2 hours ago, HeyItsJay02 said:

Hey, I was wondering how they let you know you received an entrance scholarship.

They sent me an email with a letter from the dean enclosed.

[SNAILS]

My tip for getting a B+ average (or better) in 1L is that knowing the material really well and getting good exam grades is not the same thing. A good exam grade is about issue spotting, very quickly getting as many points on the paper as possible that the professor is looking for, and balancing time between questions. Some of the top students skip class, review summaries, and do practice exams. The courses where I read every case and really got into it were not my best grades; some of the courses where I admittedly know only the bare bones were my best grades.

Going into an exam with a really deep knowledge of specific aspects of the course is not going to help you that much. If the professor assigned  3 marks for your answer about "bodily harm" in a criminal law exam, giving a thorough answer will only hurt you because it will take away from your time spotting other issues. You might write 3 paragraphs while your classmates have already moved on and caught 10 points that you  ran out of time or else would have discussed.

For a 1L to do well, you need to know how to take an exam more so than you need to know the subject matter of the course (though both will be required)

Exam marks are a game. Since employers and scholarships care about grades, you have to play the game.

Edited February 3 by SNAILS