The Coming Wave of Freshman Failure
A columnist covering K-12 education, I come to you, dear reader, with a warning: There’s a coming wave of college-freshman failure that will stress the institutions and systems of our…
Posts tagged with
“grade inflation”
The Case Against Admissions Selectivity
It’s time to do away with selective college admissions for undergraduate education. Now, let’s get the caveats out of the way. When it comes to specific training that requires particular…
“Contract-Grading” and the War Against Academic Excellence
When I was in high school in the mid-1990s, we were all required to swim in gym class. This was before wokeness. Since then, concerns over “accessibility,” “inclusion,” “acceptance,” and…
Making a College Degree More Valuable the Wrong Way
It’s old news by now that the wage premium attached to a college degree largely depends on the field of study. Engineering and health care, for example, are far more…
Could College Exit Exams Restore Confidence in Higher Ed?
Although there is no shortage of college graduates, a degree alone, unfortunately, does not guarantee students learned anything of substance while in college. The grade point averages listed at the…
Blowing the Boiler of American Education
The need for change in the visual arts may offer a way to fix two of the many fundamental problems afflicting American liberal arts education in general. These are the…
If All Men are Created Equal, Why Do We Need Grades?
I just finished a fascinating book, The Recovery of the West, by polymath Englishman Michael Roberts. Roberts became famous as a poet, but was trained as a scientist and spent…
Higher Ed Reform Hits Prime Time
The movement to reform higher education is finally entering prime time. Although major news outlets have previously aired interviews and television segments about various aspects of higher education, the coverage…
Grade Inflation Just Got Respectable: The New Eligibility Rule Governing Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship
Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship is now in its twenty-fourth year of existence. Originally the brainchild of then Governor Zell Miller, since 1993 this merit-based scholarship program has distributed in excess of…
How Our University Reacted to an Exposé of its Grade Inflation Problem
In a 2011 Pope Center article entitled “Too Many Rhinestones,” Professors T. Norman Van Cott and the late Clarence Deitsch examined Ball State University’s (BSU) grade inflation problem. After comparing…