Free The Five-Year Party by Craig Brandon Page A

empty classrooms and professors would have to be laid off. When a college’s retention policy conflicts with maintaining academic standards, as they do in Strow’s classroom, academic standards lose every time. Strow’s students’ raw grades show that most of them don’t know very much about economics, but Strow’s legerdemain grading formula pretends that they do. Although his students’ transcripts say they passed “Introduction to Economics,” the reality is that most of them didn’t really learn very much and are nearly as ignorant of economics as when they entered his class.
     
    What happens in Strow’s class is repeated in tens of thousands of classrooms in hundreds of party schools throughout America. I have spoken to more than a hundred professors who have faced exactly the same dilemma: do you give the students the grades they really deserve and thereby anger your bosses and sentence yourself to hours of confrontations or do you simply make a few adjustments to ensure that students and administrators are happy?
     
    While there are still a few holdouts who cling to the out-of-fashion idea that students who refuse to learn should fail, the vast majority of professors choose to give the students what they want. Strow’s grading curve is only one of the ways this works. Sometimes students who failed the tests and blew off assignments are awarded “extra credit” by generous professors. More commonly, the entire class is simply dumbed down to elementary school levels from the start so that every student can pass the tests without studying or even reading the textbook.
     
    When I asked professors how they could justify this, many of them replied, as Strow did, that given that these students are the first ones in their families to go to college, professors need to cut them some slack. But this argument only makes sense if you believe that going to college in and of itself carries some kind of benefit, even if you don’t do any work, read any books, or pay attention in class. It seems to imply that knowledge can be absorbed by students from the college atmosphere.
     
    What is actually taking place is a form of widespread fraud: certifying that students have learned something that they have not learned. If you probe deeper, professors who advocate this kind of grade inflation see it as a form of social engineering to increase the number of college graduates and hopefully increase their earning potential. Eventually, party schools grant diplomas to students who have not learned anything approaching what used to be required of them.
     
    This widespread fraud allows party schools to collect the tuition money that keeps the wheels of Diplomas Inc. happily turning and avoids angry confrontations with its student customers. Everyone gets to go home happy by pretending that those high grades really mean the students learned something.
     
    A generation ago, students who refused to read assignments and earned a score of 40 on the tests would have received the grade they really deserved: an F. Eventually, they would have flunked out. But in the twenty-first century, thanks to the influence of the new breed of CEO-wannabe party school administrators, higher education is less interested in education and more interested in keeping students happily paying their tuition bills, which increases their revenues. Failing students, no matter how little they have learned or how little effort they are making, is considered a poor business practice. After all, why drive paying customers away? Why ruin these students’ future by flunking them out of college?
     
    Over the past decade, classes have been dumbed down and then dumbed down again to eliminate difficult concepts, reduce the amount of required reading and writing, and reduce the amount of critical thinking skills that students need to become the leaders of tomorrow. When students still aren’t able to learn it, despite the reduced expectations, they are simply given