1. First-year night students carry a class and half less of a load than day students. The half is half of a 4-credit class, and thus it could realistically be seen as two classes less, one three credits and one two credits. Either way, it's five credits less a semester, so I don't know how you come up with one less class since there are no five credit classes. Making it seem that carrying 150% of a night students' load is the trivial matter of an extra class is plainly wrong.

Odd that I wrote it was only one. I know very well it is one-and-a-half.

Nonetheless, carrying 150% of a night student's class load in the absence of working is hardly a feat. Now, can I appreciate the complaints as it relates to those who didn't work? Probably. But there's no way you're going to convince me that 5 units of class (and only one additional substantive area of law) is the equivalent of working a full-time job.

Vigor. My experience as a night section tutor was that a number of the working people (not all, but some) were simply looking to pass, not excel. By week 3 of first semester there were a number of people, both working and not, who were copping to not having done the reading when cold-called. That is simply unheard of in the day section.

That wasn't my experience.

And while I understand you would like to have some recognition of your individual achievement of working and getting good grades, you have still not given me any reasons to believe why doing less work and at the same time competing against *groups* of people who have lower scores and less time available to them is harder than having a heavier burden while competing against people with higher scores and more time available. Objectively, exam performance is going to be reduced *as a group*. Might some individuals perform very well, even better than many or all days students? Sure. But not in the aggregate.

Night students in the aggregate isn't an important grouping with a narrower upper curve (like we used to have.) For the top grades, the competition is among those who are trying to excel.

More importantly, I'm not a big fan of assessing a person's academic quality based on their inbound scores. For one thing, I had lousy numbers -- a lousy undergrad GPA, in any case. Should that really suggest that others in that situation, along with me, couldn't handle it if we had been lumped in with day students? Somehow, I doubt it. And we're talking 1 LSAT point at the top end and 3 at the bottom end, and GPAs 0.1 point lower at the top end and 0.2 point lower at the bottom end. I'm pretty sure even those of us with such lousy numbers can still tie our shoes.

To your earlier point, night students aren't competing only against students who have a lighter load and less available time. Many night students have a lighter load and more available time than day students. At that point, the only argument is that "lower scores" simply dilutes the pool into a bunch of losers.

I agree with you that there is a disadvantage given to some night students because of the GPA adjustment, but it is so slight that it hardly bears all of this gnashing of teeth. As a friend once told me, pass and move on.

I'm sure that advice was merely offered through a friend. :)

So, here's another way of looking at the altered curve, using your position of the advantaged night students. Most of this first-year class -- if it's like mine, 2/3 -- will convert to full-time after this year. Those second year night students presumably suffer much greater in comparison.

In any event, I really didn't know I was doing that much teeth-gnashing. I think they should have considered the impact on other students USD did. I don't think it's unfair just because of the impact on second-year evening students or my fears over the impact of the A+ on movement at the top. I think changing the rules in the middle of the game is just generally unfair, when there were ways to avoid it.

(I guess I'll avoid further rants about the shift to 3 significant digits from 4.)