Our smaller school has a normal looking distribution for about the middle 70% of students, but it starts to break down at the top and bottom 15%. Reason is that once you hit a certain GPA there are so few kids around it that even two or three kids can throw it off. Statistics become less and less useful at the outer limits, especially with a smaller class size.rayiner wrote:Depending on your school (eg: NU) your curve may not be normally distributed. For most schools, the upper tail is very spread out and the lower tail is very bunched-up.
As an example, the current 1L class has several very smart kids who all ended with a 4.0 or higher, and a few others who ended above a 3.8 as well. The current 2L class to the best of my knowledge never had more than 2 or 3 kids above a 3.8. The curve stayed the same.
Using statistics, the predicted top 5% at our school is around a 3.77. For the 1L class it will in fact be around a 3.9, but for the 2L class it was a 3.7. If you combined the 2 classes however it would be almost dead on the money, funny how stats work like that.
