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Summary Of Why Colleges Show Their Students With A's By Brent Staples

1045 Words5 Pages

Brent Staples wrote a beautiful, yet unconvincing article about colleges giving away “free” A’s to students. The article, “Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s,” appeared in 1988 in the New York Times paper (Staples 935). Staples himself has earned a PhD in psychology and is a member of the New York Times editorial board (935). The general purpose of this article was to inform the audience that over the past couple of years, university grading policies have become extremely lenient (935). The audience is a very limited to educational administrations and alumni of major universities. Even though his efforts are impressive, he does not demonstrate enough credibility in this article and was not persuasive enough to get his point across …show more content…

The lack of credibility in this piece is insane. Though he has a PhD which does give him a certain amount of credibility, he does not continue to build upon this ethos throughout the article. He is not able to convince readers of his argument by being so opinionated on the subject. Being so opinionated in the article makes him seem biased and uneducated. The author makes wild accusations and tries to back them but it sounds like he is just on a long rant. What he says might make a reader think about the topic momentarily, but after thinking about it for any length of time, the reader will recognize the author is not persuasive …show more content…

Staples offers the solution that “To staunch inflation [of grades] is to change the way the grade point average is calculated” (Staples 937). He suggests that different classes should be calculated into a GPA at different levels. For example, harder science and math courses that many people steer clear of due to their difficulty, should have more opportunity to boost a student’s GPA than an easy general education class would (937). This idea might sound good on paper, but that would require every university to completely change their grading policy which not only would be time-consuming, but nearly impossible since there is virtually no way that leaders and the student body of a university would all agree on a completely new grading system. Plus, it might hinder students from being able to take classes that they actually enjoy and get a degree in a field they want to be in, not that they are forced to be in because of GPA factors.

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