Regionally Accredited Degree/Diploma Mill ???

And even having a degree from an Ivy League school isn't always a guarantee for exceptional quality. So, recently, Harvard and other top notch schools got in the news in this regard. Here is what I've posted earlier:

According to a German weekly:
-last summer 91 percent of Harvard graduates received honours(sounds suspicious).
-According to a recent statistic, students at Harvard have earned year by year better grades since the sixties.
-There is a remark that many universities have been practically run like businesses and have experienced tough competition since the eighties, so this could be one reason for grade inflation.
-Students are evaluating their professors so the latter refrain from giving bad grades in order to keep the job.
-Some professors avoid giving low grades because, in their opinion, this could dismotivate the students.
-White professors avoid giving bad marks to Afro-American students.

Additional links:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2002/02/08/edtwof2.htm
http://www.cornelldailysun.com/articles/5320/

 

Interesting point. A faculty member at the California community college where I used to work received a Ph.D. from Laurence University in Santa Barbara. Since it was not regionally accredited, he was not allowed to use it for salary placement or have it listed in the catalog. No one ever calls him "Doctor". Interestingly enough, he started claiming that his degree was from the Unversity of Sarasota, after that institution became accredited. I'll have to find out if he now claims a degree from Argosy!

If those with unaccredited Ph.D.s could no longer call themselves "doctor," publishers would have to recall millions of copies of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," all of those relationship books by Barbara DeAngelis and a ton of books by religious authors from unaccredited theological seminaries.

Tony

 

The argument that Harvard would have to inflate grades in order to retain students holds little water--undergraduate admissions are as selective as they have ever been. Student evaluations are a possible "culprit," although I don' t think that students evaluating professors is a bad thing...it provides a check on the professor who would concentrate only on getting grants and citations...still, I'd suspect that the academic star who cranks out heavily-cited papers in prestigious journals and pulls in millions in grants is going to continue to be valued by institutions over excellent teachers who don't "pull their weight."

Another claim I've heard is that there has been a shift in attitude within faculties, the thought being that anyone who managed to get into an Ivy-league school is already top-caliber and doesn't deserve to be graded on a curve. I remember "the curve" in Freshman Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley--it was pretty brutal, and explicitly so. Half the class would get a C or lower, no matter how high or low the test scores. My lab partner, who worked her butt off, got an F. The justification was that they had to weed out a certain (large) percentage of those who wanted to go into the sciences. These days, however, unlike when I went to Cal 20 years ago, almost nobody who gets into U.C. Berkeley or Harvard hasn't completed the equivalent Advanced Placement Chemistry class in high school, and gotten a high mark on the AP exam. So maybe the grade inflation is justified, since the "weeding out" already happened.

Finally, it should be noted that despite the current generation's whining about the next generation (which has been consistent through the millenia--Aristotle complained about the same thing) somehow the world seems to go on--breakthroughs are still being made at an astonishing rate, even by "these kids of today" as my Grandma used to call them.

As for white professors not giving bad marks to black students, I'd be very surprised to see anything but anecdotal evidence for this. I'm sure there have been some incidents here and there, but I haven't seen any evidence of systematic grade inflation of one ethnic group over another.