A world beholden to the GPA

Penn has a nasty little problem. Well, Penn probably has many nasty problems, but the one that's on my mind at the moment is grade inflation.

The average GPA in the College is holding steady at 3.3, and would no doubt be a lot higher if it weren't for me. But alas, next year I'll be gone, and thus I will no longer be able to single-handedly bring down the College's average GPA, at which point it will no doubt skyrocket to double digits.

So it's best for Penn to look into this now. The administration does this every now and then, and I think sometimes it forms a task force, but generally nothing changes.

And why should it? Grade inflation serves the students in obvious ways (more A's to wave under the noses of recruiters who came looking for "original thinkers" and "creativity," the poor misguided bastards). But it also serves professors, and to an even greater extent. There is an undeniable correlation between high grades and student satisfaction, and for professors, student satisfaction is a great career move.

Course evaluations can influence a professor's future at an institution, including salary, benefits and tenure. So considering grade inflation helps students and profs, its no wonder little has been done about it. Plus, look at the negatives -- handing out non-inflated grades is a surefire way to invite backlash from enraged students (A B+? I haven't been this insulted since someone brought a third-generation Kennedy to the yachting club! We have a four-generation minimum!). And of course, more importantly, those enraged students also have enraged parents, who are also often enraged wealthy alumni.

I'm not going to waste your time pining for an idealistic world where the pursuit of knowledge trumps the pursuit of personal success, although it does strike me as odd that grade inflation essentially turns college into one of those county-fair games where "everyone's a winner." I think the more interesting question is why grade inflation is so rampant, not just at Penn but also at almost every elite university. When universities do the annual semi-introspective dance around grade inflation and complaints of grade-grubbing, they could do worse than to look at how their own internal selection process locks them into that course from the start.

If you asked admissions officers what kind of student really appeals to them, they probably wouldn't say extremely motivated, ambitious, obsessive people who, though highly intelligent, put their intellects to use figuring out how to turn a B+ into an A- and an A- into an A instead of doing things like reading books just because the topic interests them. But that is exactly the type of student that excels in the admissions process.

Most colleges will instead claim that they are looking for intellectuals who are active in their communities, classroom characters whose interest in knowledge is not restricted to a fetish for the first letter of the alphabet. Personally, I think every time a Penn student bitches about an A- God kills a puppy. But I know that's not true, because if it were, we'd be looking at a canine genocide of epic proportions.

Sure, you want the high SAT scores. But what does it say when the kid with the high SAT scores stayed in on weekends to study for the test and took it seven times? When asked what's better, A's in easier classes or B's in tougher classes, admissions officers love to say "A's in the tough classes." But why does the student with a passion for Romance languages need an A in calculus? What earthly sense does that make?

Yes, it is hard to sift through thousands of applications. But the kind of student who gets in is too often the one who can't live with a B, even if he deserves one. And that is not necessarily the kind of atmosphere an institution of learning should be tolerating.

Sure, that kind of thinking is a boon in some professions, such as investment banking. Penn happens to produce world-class investment bankers. But why should we produce lawyers and teachers and doctors who think like investment bankers?

I tend to view myself as a Penn admissions error. I pretty much think that Penn meant to mail out an acceptance letter to a different Eliot Sherman, one with a 1600 SAT score who overcame a deadly illness to learn seven languages and is already a board-certified neurosurgeon. Instead, by accident, they accepted a decent writer who remains to this date largely mystified by math and science, when "mystified by" translates to "not receiving A's in."

And what's wrong with that?

Eliot Sherman is a senior English major from Philadelphia and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman normally appears on Tuesdays.

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