Grade inflation is to higher education what social promotion is to grade school. The Chicago Tribune has this (login with username/password as the username and password):
"When you come to a school like Northwestern, everyone's a perfectionist anyway and is intelligent," said Kellie Mitchell, a freshman from Kansas City, Kan., who received three A-minuses and a B her first quarter.
But the avalanche of A's has the Medill faculty and administrators concerned. Medill Dean Loren Ghiglione has set up a committee to study the matter and is even talking about reviving the nearly extinct grade of C.
Ghiglione said at a meeting with Medill faculty there was a consensus to "try to reintroduce this notion: To get a C at Medill is not a horrible thing."
Medill is Northwestern's School of Journalism. I'm a journalism TA at the University of Wisconsin, one of the top j-schools in the country (alum Anthony Shadid just won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting), and this is something that we're genuinely concerned about, but not especially worried about. My students this semester will definitely not be getting 56% A's, and neither will the other TAs', based on what they've told me. However, given what we've heard from some students, many other TA's and professors are not so conscientious. A lot of our kids are devastated by even BC's (the equivalent of a B- or C+) and still somewhat shocked by B's.
Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra ::: 2004:04:06:19:08