Free The Five-Year Party by Craig Brandon

arrived late and slept through his class. None of them asked questions or engaged in any form of discussion. 60
     
    At the end of each semester, Strow faces a dilemma. The best students, the ones who took the class because they were interested in economics and who took the time to read the textbook, score 94 or 96 on the tests, which is obviously an A. No problem there. The slackers, however, the majority who didn’t give a hoot about economics, didn’t read the assignments, and didn’t pay attention in class, scored only in the 40s and 50s, which you would think would be a solid F.
     
    When Strow adds up the grades for assignments and exams, the average for all the students in the class is about 55 out of 100. If he used the raw numbers and the traditional grading standards, he would have to flunk more than half his class. But flunking large numbers of students is considered a bad business practice at America’s party schools, where administrators are constantly chanting the “retention, retention” mantra and keeping students happy is more important than maintaining educational standards. Failure, the administrators insist, is no longer an option. It discourages students, makes them unhappy, and encourages them to drop out or transfer to another college.
     
    Flunking a student sets up the professor for hours of angry confrontations with students who think they are entitled to at least a B just for showing up and who have learned that it’s much easier to cut a deal with the professor for a good grade than to study and do well on the tests. Unhappy students can mercilessly savage professors on their year-end evaluations of them, setting up additional confrontations with administrators, which could put the professor’s job on the line.
     
    So, reluctantly, to make everyone happy and to keep the peace, Strow has invented a wonderful magic wand that he waves over his grade book to transform slackers into scholars. One wave of his wand and failing grades disappear and nearly everyone gets an A, a B, or a C. He calls it a “pretty big curve,” a mathematical formula that adjusts students’ grades significantly upward.
     
    “A 40 magically becomes a C,” he said. “It’s retention, retention, retention that we focus on and for valid reasons. Most of our students are the first ones in their families to go to college.” 61
     
    Gary Ransdell, the president at WKU, not only defends this blatant dumbing down of class content and grade inflation but insists upon it to keep the college’s wheels turning efficiently. “The Commonwealth of Kentucky tells President Ransdell that your budget will be based on how many students you enroll, retain and graduate,” he told his PBS interviewer. “If he (Strow) wants to get paid he’s going to retain students. It does us no good and it does the Commonwealth of Kentucky no good for students to enroll and then leave.” 62
     
    Randsell talks about enrollment, retention, and graduation but leaves out the word that used to be the most important mission of colleges and universities: education. The justification for the dumbing down of America’s party schools only works if you conveniently forget that education is the reason colleges exist in the first place. If you leave education out, the whole process becomes a simple exercise in certificate purchasing. Students pay tuition to buy the diploma that the college is selling. You can learn something if you want, but if you’d rather not bother, that’s okay. They’ll sell you a diploma anyway.
     
    Cooking your grade book to give students passing grades they do not deserve is so common at party schools these days that faculty and administrators don’t even think twice about doing it. The practice, as Strow says, is so essential to the operation of colleges in the twenty-first century that they simply could not function without it. Without grade inflation and dumbing down of classes, many colleges would be facing nearly