When an athlete has a 5.01 GPA, could grade inflation be involved?
The visiting Harvard football team was disembarking from a jet, and its players stopped by the news stand at the airport to pick up some reading material for their bus ride to the hotel, or so the story goes.
An increasingly agitated fan watched as they chose copies of The Economist, The New Yorker and Forbes. Finally, a defensive lineman looked around for a couple of minutes before picking up a comic book and the fan sighed, “Thank goodness, we have a chance.”
I thought of this anecdote recently when I heard about an athlete with a 5.01 GPA, which struck me as — impossible. I’d heard about grade inflation, and was aware that some fractional amounts were being awarded to special students in excess of 4.0, but I didn’t believe that grades and breached the 5’s. Thanks Joe Biden.
As you might suspect, I have an uneasy history of scholastic metrics. We had no kindergarten, but my first grading period in first grade I had all A’s which, in my little mind, proved I could do it and dismissed me from any further need to try.
My greater concern at the time was: What happened to E? It all seemed quite the logical progression, A, B, C, D — but then they jumped right to F.
In my first-grader brain, I felt sorry for E for being left out. I was inclusive way before inclusivity was a thing, and it didn’t seem fair. This morphed into the conclusion that E must have done something wrong and had been sent to the furnace room.
In my elementary school, no lie, the punishment arc went: hand spanking, paddle spanking, spanking with a rubber hose and then if you were really bad, relegation to the furnace room, which was pitch black save for the hellish flames from the coal boiler. It was widely accepted among 6-year-olds that, even if you could endure a beating with the rubber hose standing on your head, the furnace room was to be avoided at all costs.
Matter of fact, F stood for furnace for all I knew. I only got one F, in my scholastic history, and that was in seventh grade art. We had our choice, and I wanted to paint, even as the trendy, art-teacher-preferred medium at the time was some kind of brightly colored plastic chips that were melted into some two-dimensional representation of a sunflower or Mickey Mouse or something.
The melting process produced a dark swirl of toxic smoke that I feel sure must have shaved a half dozen IQ points off of anyone who fused a profile of Scooby Doo, and probably accounted for an otherwise unexplained dip in standardized test scores of rising eighth graders that confounded administrators in Berkeley Springs Junior High.
Anyway, because I was the only kid who opted out of the plastic colored chip medium, I got no painting guidance, and yes I was terrible, but I tried sort of, and in today’s environment that would have landed you a C, but not then.
Fortunately, this occurred in the one and only six-week grading period in school history that they experimented with disposable report cards that did not have to be returned to the teacher who would check them to make sure that, say, some kid who has unfairly been given an F in art hadn’t changed it to a B.
It should be mentioned that many kids in rural West Virginia circa 1973 wouldn’t have bothered because their parents barely paid any attention at all — evidenced by the fact that it was not unheard of for a teacher to open the envelope with the report card the parent was to have signed, only discover a check to the power company.
Today though, I take it a 4.0 doesn’t even get you noticed. So the slackers may have had it right all along.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: When an athlete has a 5.01 GPA, could grade inflation be involved?
