COLUMN: Keeping up with the GPA Joneses

From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00 From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00Economics is called the "dismal science" for good reason. Unfortunately, economists get a bum rap -- much like weathermen -- despite their insights into the functions and inevitable malfunctions of economic markets. In the real world, economists and politicians have devised clever contraptions to sustain human existence and prosperity. Welfare economics, "voodoo" economics and Marxism are among the schemes that have emerged to make the world a better, safer, happier place populated by crack addicts, B-52 bombers and extraordinary surpluses of vodka. So if there is such a thing as welfare economics, why not welfare academics? Grade distributions are highly inequitable. In a single class, it is common for 15 percent of a class to control 100 percent of the As. And across the University, Communications and SARS majors are notorious for "favorable" GPAs relative to hard-working engineers and Finance majors. Many political, social and economic commentators have proclaimed inflation dead, a relic of the '70s that died back in the day, along with unprotected sex. But inflation is just napping, fatigued after ravaging Latin America in the 1980s and East Asia in 1997. Perhaps the time has come to aggressively encourage it out of its slumber. Let's consider all the great things inflation has done for the world, and examine its possible applications in the world of academics. First and foremost, many economists consider low, stable inflation a healthy component of a growing economy. For the past 30 years, the U.S. economy has averaged an annual inflation rate of around 5-7 percent, and for the past 15 years the economy has experienced consistently low inflation in the range of 2-4 percent. According to my estimates, grade inflation at Penn over these same periods has averaged startlingly less than .05 percent per year! The University has been practicing an exceedingly tight grading policy that has stifled innovation, creativity and overall growth over the past decade, all to the benefit of the great academic oligarchies--M&T; students, pre-meds and really anal people. In the '60s, Keynesian economists helped popularize the Phillips Curve, a theory asserting that whenever unemployment is low, inflation tends to be high, and vice versa. Armed with this theory -- based on complex lines arbitrarily drawn on napkins to resemble smiley faces -- politicians argued for moderate inflation in order to achieve long-term full employment. Surely students are faced with a Phillips Curve of their own when eying the world of employment beyond the gated Penn community. Considering that our futures lie in the balance, a little grade inflation would be good for students and raise overall morale. For a few years, employers would be totally duped into thinking that a 4.0 out of Penn was something special. The gracious graduates of Penn would then easily move on to lucrative positions on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and with prestigious consulting firms around the world. This could result in a huge windfall for the university as alumni donations surge in response to newfound wealth. It should also be duly noted that our comrades at Stanford, Duke and Princeton have practiced a policy of grade inflation for years, with wholly positive side effects. A by-product of grade inflation is the inevitable degradation of the value of a grade -- essentially, the current currency of choice in academia will be defaced and deflowered to the point of utter worthlessness. In this "cashless" academic society, we can then be judged on how an education at Penn is valued, rather than arbitrary measures of performance like "tests," "homework" and "intelligence." As such, there will be more of an impetus for administrators to consistently ensure a quality educational experience, more of a need for Penn to be intricately responsible for how the world will perceive us when we graduate. Penn's interests will align with all of ours more closely, and therefore the administration will have to work to make sure that each student is capable of fulfilling the promise of a Penn graduate. In a world of baseless grades, we become equals with a common desire to see not only ourselves, but all those around us succeed. And oh, what a world it would be. Academic socialism. A world without grades is a world without walls. You didn't think they used "red" brick on the Walk for nothing?