1. If so, which ones?

2. Conversely, which law schools are sticking to high academic standards while grading?

3. Does grade inflation make a difference during placements or LLM programmes? Will a law firm or foreign university prefer someone with an "inflated" A+ in X NLU or someone with an "honest" B in Y NLU? Do law firm HRs and foreign university staff blindly look at grades?

One of the reasons I am asking is that I know a girl from a T1 NLU who had excellent marks in ICSE/ISC (which is a much tougher board than CBSE) and was one of the top students in her school. I expected her to go to Harvard or something, but her rank was in the middle and she went for an LLM at Warwick. She told me that she couldn't make it to better colleges because her grades weren't that high and the teachers in her NLU were very strict.

1. Enough students have gone to foreign universities with an Indian LLB for them to know what a particular grade from an NLU is likely to mean. Therefore, they will have formed opinions on which is good and which isn't. Some, even, say so openly on their website, e.g., King's, who say that you need to be from a university "considered prestigious by King's" and have good grades from there (maybe misquoting, speaking from memory, don't have the page to hand ATM, but it was definitely something to that effect). Melbourne says something similar, I believe. Obviously, this means that an NLSIU kind of a degree is likely to be more valued than let us say (in modern conditions) a NUJS or some random TLC. Some mediocre places might still blindly look at good grades, but you wouldn't want to go to those anyway.

2. As somebody who studies in Britain at an RG uni, I am telling you this from observation. You should be aware that they tend (even if they don't say so) to look down on even the best NLUs as not being strict enough, in some senses. This is because those NLUs allow for students who fail/do badly in a law course exam to repeat it and still achieve within the full spectrum of grades. The Brits, on the other hand, do things very differently. If people fail module examinations here, they are made to resit the exam, but at most unis (particularly the Russell Group ones), the academic regulations are designed in such a way that the marks of students are 'capped' at the minimum passing grade (40% at the undergraduate level) if they fail an exam without extenuating circumstances; this means that, even if they achieve the highest mark on the resit exam, the mark noted on their transcripts will be 40%. (Of course, this doesn't take into account the situations where there are valid extenuating circumstances, like illness.) For people complaining about "academic rigour" and using UK law schools as a justification, this may be something worth thinking about. If I were somebody like Sudhir, the NLSIU VC, in order to make my institution's degrees even more highly perceived than they already are overseas, I'd tweak my own AER similarly to match the UK standard.

You also want to think about whether some foreign law schools are themselves carrying out grade inflation, if you are thinking about an LLM. There have been serious accusations against Manchester in this regard. So you want to make sure that you aren't going to an LLM uni with grade inflation, in addition to ensuring your undergraduate uni has their house clean on that front :))).

Yes.

1) from my experience and those of people I know : Jgls, nalsar , nujs , nlu delhi have serious grade inflation problems that can and might lead to devaluing the degree. They should look at whether grade curves/ average/median gpas have remained stable since inception or no

2) nls has a curve that they make evaluators stick to now. Something like only 15% of the class can get the top two grades or something. It’s not a perfect system - but it’s a check.

3) Indian law firms ? They’re basically factories for law clerks - they’ll take anyone from the top places for a few years - the test will be to see who advances to SA and beyond.

LLM - you need top 20 % to have a hope at funding , unfunded positions are easy to get. Law firm HR has very different needs than llm admissions officers. The HR in firms don’t even often check to make sure you’ve gotten your degree- I know more than a couple of people who don’t have degrees and continue to work at their job post graduation, and one who was found out. The admissions officers have to be careful who they are spending money on- they have an informal system that ranks foreign universities and - they will prefer someone from a better school with a poorer grade than someone from a worse school with a good grade- all else being equal. People with poor class ranks from top law school get into ivies, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, Chicago, Oxbridge all the time. But people with good ranks from middling unis don’t get in precisely because the admissions officers have no faith in the degree.

Consider that your friend is coping. Many people go to top law schools - all of them have been exceptional students in school, all of them were school toppers and got great board marks and quizzed and debated and MUN ed, and we’re school leaders. Someone has to be at the bottom of the law school class - and that usually depends on the person who is burning out that term or the person who isn’t working as hard as others at exams and papers.

Most teachers are happy to give students good grades when they’re earned- if you’re correcting like 60-140 papers 3 times a term - you’ll see a lot of nonsense written and you’ll be thrilled to award points when it’s deserved. So if someone really deserves better grades - most teachers would usually fight moderation policies to make that happen. Sometimes we just fall short and our best efforts fall short.

If you read even one thread on Legally India "you’ll see a lot of nonsense written", including (in part) the comment from which this is quoted.

1. Who gave you the idea that "unfunded positions are easy to get" at the UK law schools? They have minimum grades entry requirements, for god's sake, below which they won't even consider an application, no matter who is funding the applicant! Please look at the LLM websites for the various unis and ask admissions officers before potentially spending north of 7500 INR in application fees and then getting disappointed. Caveat: nobody's saying that "unfunded positions" aren't slightly easier than scholarships to obtain.

2. We are supposed to believe that "they will prefer someone from a better school with a poorer grade than someone from a worse school with a good grade". Things are neither as simple nor as black-and-white as this. What if someone from the "better school" with a good or even the top grade applies? No admissions officer (especially in this hawkish climate in the UK, with the government bouncing on their heads to reduce international recruitment) is going to be willing to make any compromises on grades. So, in a sentence: law school applicants (who are considering an LLM down the line), just do your utmost to get into the best law school you possibly can and work hard to achieve the top grades from day 1 (latter part of this advice applies to law students in early stage of their law school education as well, for whom I'll add that making a transfer if you can is worth it (e.g., NLUJ - NALSAR/NLUD/NLSIU)); for the rest, if (a) you have been to a law school where there's grade inflation and where you have good grades; or (b) you are at a good law school with weaker grades, please just accept (and I am sorry mods if this sounds angry) that LLM applications may not bring you all that much joy in life.

Regards,

Someone starting a UK LLM at a Russell Group university in London in 2024 - 25 and an Oxbridge reject who has no shame in admitting it

I would suspect that you, actually, would be guilty of such a thing. Those of us who genuinely are interested in the law and recognise Sudhir for what he is, an excellent scholar and a human being with both admirable qualities and flaws, haven't forgotten what your lot did. Anyone remember the incident of fireworks set off in his NUJS office? Fireworks which, if he had been present, could have done him serious injury? And what have you who accuse the one person we have got who is the closest that India has to a world-class academic done? You are the sorts of people because of whom NUJS, a fine institution, has become a sad, pathetic shell of what it once was, riddled with grade inflation and politics. Instead of saying such scandalous things about a clever, sincere, hard-working guy (who is by no means perfect), can you instead talk more about incompetent sloths such as NKC, under whose reign inappropriate behaviours of all kind by people with lots of power have proliferated?

Okay NWs :). I see I owe you an apology, which I sincerely give out. Sorry about the tirade, just that this site allows people to talk about Krishnaswamy in a way that they don't allow for anybody else, clearly showing that some of their people have taken a hatchet to him, so some folks like me tend to become a bit oversuspicious at times :).

Lol, Sudhir a world class academic? By which metric? As for fireworks, that was all smoke and sound, literally, deliberately created in an empty room. Not at all good, but hardly the life threatening calamity that you are making it out to be. He was not held accountable for his multiple objectionable behaviour at NUJS because of his godfather MP Singh, that's all. While I am all for criticising NKC, you as a Sudhir fanboy does not get to do that because you lack the locus.

You seem to imply that just because she was an ISC topper, that she should have the sacred right to be a T1 NLU topper and also go on to Harvard/Oxford. Nothing could be further from the truth - 5 years at law school changes many people, and many of the school prodigies lose their way in academics

Indeed they do, can confirm as someone in the final year of law school. In fact, many of us, from all backgrounds, end up in that situation. While I am Indian myself, I was lucky enough to have been brought up in a family which had the economic resources to help me (financially) get an international school education; as someone who went to IIT with modest means, my dad taught me at an early age the habit of grasping the bull by the horns, so I took that opportunity to gain the right grades, perform well enough in the admission tests etc. and go to England for law school (though I will admit this would have been much harder if my dad hadn't had the resources, and even if I had been admitted to law school here, I may have found it hard to go if things had been difficult financially). But while I found (to my pleasant surprise) a reasonable number of people like myself (from both Indian and western exam boards) here, all of whom had done pretty well (my profile, in terms of board marks, is on the lower end of the spectrum at my institution), something happened to a number of them in law school, and they became either too full of themselves or lost their confidence/motivation to study entirely, which had the inevitable consequence that that always has, meaning some of my fellow Indian students will, I fear, be returning home after graduating from law school this July, disappointed and embittered, despite the leg up that we all got. The point is, if it happens to some of us Indian nepos in England, no surprises if it happens back home too!

On the contrary, every NLU VC does shady stuff and hopes that the students won't openly protest against them. Hence they keep appeasing students with easy grades and attendance. Then there are VCs like Sudhir who has got friends in really high places, so he can afford to alienate students in his quest for discipline.