There is a new comment on my post Education First? or, Endowment First? . I recommend reading the whole comment; but, here, I want to call attention to the excellent description of how much everything changed in such a short time. I will add some thoughts at the end.
“When I first started college in 1967, the first thing we were told was that the first year would be hard, in order to weed out the students who “weren’t college material.” We were told that in this manner, those who returned the 2nd year would be the “serious students” who would have the potential to graduate. We didn’t get study sheets for exams, we were told that we were responsible for ALL of the information, both from the lecture AND from the book.
I took a hiatus after my first year and returned to college in 1970. Imagine my amazement upon my return when I was in history class and the professor handed out a “study sheet” for the exam, politely implying that the study sheet basically had all of the exam questions on it (and the actual exam proved that it did.)”
There is a good site with data on grade inflation www.gradeinflation.com The site’s graph “Variability in Grading…” shows that grade inflation took off in the late 60’s. As I recall, according to David Riesman, it started as a response to Vietnam and continued during hard economic times that frightened universities. Of course, Riesman wrote in 1980 before the next “Great Inflation” and the follow on “Content Deflation”, which made grade inflation unnecessary in many cases.
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