To the Editor:
"Grades don't mean anything." Oh yeah? Grades, for students, are the currency of the institution. Tell that history professor ("A lesson in learning: what do grades mean?" Jan. 15) his salary has been cut in half and see if he blows it off as meaningless. Not just at Dartmouth but throughout academe, grading, in practice, is corrupt and corrupting. Profs inflate grades in order to be popular, prevent unflattering evaluations (that adversely affect pay raises, promotion, and tenure) or recruit students for their course and department--or all three. Moreover, even at their best, grades signify different things when awarded by different professors. A few decades ago, I surveyed the faculty at a college that plays Dartmouth in hockey. I asked my colleagues whether their grades were based on their sense of national, local college or particular class student performance; whether they were a means of encouraging effort or measured achievement; whether the hope of attracting students to the professor's department ever played a role in raising grades; etc. The answers were fairly evenly distributed among the stated reasons. If that were not bad enough, I was then censured by my department for conducting the survey. The charge was that I had issued the survey as though it came from the English department. In fact, I had done no such thing, and said so. The indictment was then altered to charge that I had made the department look bad. In colleges, you see, some questions should never be asked.
If evaluations of student performance are ever to mean anything, something akin to uniform standards need to be imposed. The current situation simply results in assigning ever greater weight to GREs, Law Boards, Med Boards, and the like. Faculty, who are to blame for the current corruption, cannot be entrusted with reform.
Frank Gado 58White River Junction, VT
