From the New York Times:
One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average. But it’s not because they are all working harder. The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.
From the Washington Post:
The Marine Corps has discharged 13 junior officers training at Quantico for cheating on a land navigation test [...] They were taking an intense, six-month training course for new officers and were trying to learn how to lead a platoon through rugged terrain. They were sent with a map and compass to a wooded area on the base and instructed to write down numbers painted on boxes left there. The accused wrote down numbers from the previous year’s test…
The defense for both events? Everyone’s doing it! Which, of course, doesn’t make me feel a bit better. That just means that there’s more “A+” students out there who are actually A- (or B+, or C-) students graded on a curve.
I also admire the Marine OCS cadets for their sheer chutzpah– they’re going to lead people in combat, and they don’t even have the common courtesy to learn basic skills? What happens when they’re in a war zone and have to bring their squad back in through a minefield… at night… with no GPS gear? How many letters to parents will they have to right before it dawns on them that this happened because of their mental laziness?
(NYT article via Jennifer, WaPo article via Laginappe’s Guy)
