Although many colleges and universities, most visibly Princeton and Harvard, have recently taken steps to combat so-called grade inflation, their quotas on straight-A students may not make getting the grade more valuable.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) found that over a 17-year period, the number of As given out by colleges and universities went up from 7 percent to 26 percent, while the number of so-called “Gentlemen’s Cs” that they passed on dropped by 66 percent. The group suggests several key reasons for the trend.
“Causes of grade inflation include pressure to keep students as ‘consumers’ happy, the fear that students will write negative evaluations of professors who maintain high academic standards, desire by faculty members to avoid the additional work and conflict that honest grading can entail, and ideological hostility by some faculty to the very concepts of merit, achievement, and excellence that undergird grading.”
The ideology of the courses that students take cannot be overlooked. As we usually find, most professors have a hard time distinguishing between instruction and indoctrination and usually lean in favor of the latter.
Four years ago, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) found that college students today have not attained as much knowledge as high school students half a century ago. For example, the NAS reported, “When asked, ‘In what country was the Battle of Waterloo fought?’ only 3% of this year’s college seniors correctly identified the country as Belgium, as opposed to 44% of the 1950s high school graduates and 64% of the 1950s college graduates.”
Researchers at the University of California estimate that only two percent of colleges in this country have what could be called a true core curriculum. Such a curriculum would subdivide the world in order to gain a better understanding of it, with courses in literature, history, math and science.
Instead, ACTA finds, “most colleges offer something quite different: a smorgasbord of courses designed less around the intellectual needs of the students than around the interests of the professors.”
And what are these interests? Research done by educational groups, including ours, indicates that these specialties range from the politically correct to the downright perverse. For instance, the Young America’s Foundation found that Princeton, in its unceasing desire to create a class struggle in a country which has had more mobility between income brackets than any other in history, offers courses in both “Race and Sport” and “Stratification and Inequality.”
The latter course “surveys the main topics in the area of inequality, from the classical work of Marx and Weber to contemporary research on race discrimination and the feminization of poverty.”
Furthermore, Accuracy in Academia has discovered that at least two schools—Cornell and Temple—offer courses given by professors enthusiastic about the practice of pedophilia. Does anyone really want to get an “A” in those?
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
