To The Editor:
In saying that her four years of hard work have been demeaned, Ms. Carpino is correct, but not in the way she thinks. She will graduate with many classmates who have put forth only a fraction of the intellectual effort that she has, and yet will have the same GPA. Her hard-won degree will consequently be devalued unfairly by the world at large. Word has already come back from New York and Boston that Fairfield graduates are lazy and spoiled. Fairfield could go the way of another eastern university that churned out so many high-GPA but low-achieving graduates that the seven major accounting firms stopped recruiting there.
We cannot wish this problem away. The embarrassing survey results that Ms. Carpino would like to dismiss as “mysterious” are easily accessible research conducted by Dr. Kurt Schlichting of Sociology and Ms. Phyllis Fitzpatrick of Management Information. As to the hazards of linking SATs to university performance, this is exactly what an opponent of my proposal did in suggesting that Fairfield’s recent grade increases were the result of better (higher-SAT) students. Alas, the SATs were recentered in 1996 so that the vast majority of scores are artificially higher.
I do not think that all Fairfield students are passive or anti-intellectual; this was a misquotation. I am proud of those students who want to learn, but I am disgusted by the anti-intellectual atmosphere against which they have to struggle here. From the students who assure freshmen that nobody studies on Thursday nights, Friday nights, or the weekend, to those professors who give out high grades in dumbed-down courses and are rewarded for it with greater enrollments and more time for research, to the administrators who use student evaluations to help decide which professors will receive merit pay, the whole system is stacked against academic standards. Do we want this to continue until a Fairfield diploma is all but worthless?
Sincerely,
William Abbott Department of History
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