submitted by U. Schaffer

 

Too Many A’s
College grades, along with almost
everything else, have been going up late-
ly. Stanford University undergraduates
were astonished recently to read in the
student paper that their grade point av-
had spiraled to 3.5+ (or just under
an’A). “I’ve worked hard to get good
grades here, and I thought they would
help when I was ready for grad school,”
said Patricia Fels, a senior. “Now I find
out everybody has good grades.”
Indeed, in the past few years, the
grade glut has been spreading across ac-
ademe. At Yale, 42% of all undergrad-
uate spring-term grades were A’s, and
46% of the senior class graduated with

honors. “It’s tidiculous,” says Eva Bal-
ogh, dean of Yale’s Morse College.
“They get q B and they bawl. It takes a
man or woman of real integrity to give
a B.” At American University; 75% of
all grades last spring were A’s and B’s,
leading dn iindergraduaté dean to ask
for a faculty inquiry. At the University
of Pittsburgh, the average grade was c
five years ago; now itis B.

Why? Many students are using
pass/fail options in difficult courses, thus
reducing the percentage of ‘low letter
grades. For their part, many professors
started giving higher grades i in the late
60s to help students escape the draft,
and some have. Wanted to avoid what
they regard as the “punitive” effects of
grading. Explains Pittsburgh Dean Rob-
_ ert Marshall: “We're getting away from
the old. concept that people should be re-
quired to jump through hoops.” Some in-
structors are overly aware of the faculty
evaluations their students will write at
the end of the course. In effect, they are
bribing students with good grades to get
good grades themselves. Others are sim-
ply being generous, awarding more A’s

and B’s because students need them to
get into graduate school. This is tough on
graduate schools. “Everyone coming in
with a 4.0 makes it hard to evaluate the
grades,” says William Keogh, assistant
dean of Stanford’s law school. As a re-
sult, many graduate schools are increas-
ingly depending on entrance exams.

The Stanford faculty committee that
first uncovered the staggering grade
point average was appointed four years
ago when the university did away with
D and F grades and permitted students
to take a pass/fail option in any course
outside their major. The committee has
until Christmas to make its final report
on how the new system is working. It
probably will not be too harsh. “We just

 

live in a nonjudgmental society,” said
Committee Chairman Bradley Efron, a
professor of statistics. But today’s grad-
uates may be in for a rude shock when
they discover that in the workaday
world, not everyone can count on A’s.

Bonehead English

Almost half the freshmen at the
University- of California at Berkeley
flunked an English composition exam
this fall. They have had to enroll in a re-
medial course known around the cam-
pus as “Bonehead English.” At the Uni-
versity of Miami, the English depart-
ment has set. up an elaborate tutoring

center where video tapes are used to help |

entering students Jearn grammar, punc-
tuation and organization. At the Univer-
sity of Houston, 60% of the freshmen fail
the first three essays they write. Says Jes-
se Hartley, Houston’s director of fresh-
man English: “Students can’t carry
through an idea in writing; they have no
idea what a paragraph is; they are un-
able to string details together in a logical
sequence. They’re just sort of vapid.”

d

SIAWG NOWT

College English instructors have
made similar complaints in the past, but
the percentage of incompetent writers
among entering freshmen has risen in
recent years. Maxine Hairston, director
of freshman English at the University of
Texas at Austin, blames the shortcom-
ings on the fact that high school students
do not read as much as their predeces-
sors. “They were reared on television,”
she says. “They simply were not forced
to use the language very much.” Says
Robert Hosman, chairman of the Uni-
versity of Miami’s English department;
“The fundamentals are not being taught
properly in secondary schools. The SAT
(Scholastic Aptitude Test] and College
Board scores across the country have
shown a considerable lowering of verbal
ability.” In fact, the College Board has
devised a written English test to help
colleges place freshmen in the appropri-
ate class. Some 425,000 high school stu-
dents took the new 50-question test
—along with their entrance exams—for
the first time last week.

At Berkeley, says Instructor Kim-
berly Davis, the average student in the
Bonehead English ‘course “attended a
good high school, probably received B’s
if not A’s in English, and is either dis-
tressed, appalled or outraged to discover
that he can’t write up to university stan-
dards. etsy Berkeley: students recently
put their anger in writing. After some

' editing help from their instructor they

mailed a letter to their high school Eng-
lish department protesting their poor
preparation. They never got an answer.

Orderly Fashion. The decline in
writing ability shows up even at Har-
vard, where all undergraduates must
take a twelve-week course in expository
writing. “We try to teach them to write a
simple, clear sentence that says what
they mean and then arrange those sen-
tences in some orderly fashion,” says
English Professor Gwynne Evans.
“Most of them don’t know how to do that
when they come here.” The discipline
was too much for one Harvard student.
“It nearly drove me crazy,” he says. “I
tried to*write what I was really feeling
and I got all these irrelevant comments
about grammar. all over the pages. I
ran through the streets of Cambridge
weeping.”

Some educators seem inclined to
ease the anguish of the students. Last
spring the Conference on College Com-
position and Communications* voted
“to uphold the right of students to their
own language.” The resolution outraged
some professors, including John Gabel,
head of the English department at Ohio
State University. “It is broad enough to
wipe out even the need to learn how to
spell,” he says. “That’s misplaced hu-
manism, not education.”

*The conference represents 3,000 college English
instructors.

TIME, NOVEMBER 11, 1974