Reply #15: as a college instructor, I also look at what students do with their knowledge [View All]

[Lisa]

I've taught a number of C students who have really impressed me. Sometimes I've met them after, at various jobs, or if they ask me for a letter of reference. And that gives me a chance to see if people got anything out of the course, and whether it changed their perspective on the world. One guy (who started out as a party animal with the grades to match) decided to take a year off and work in a developing country. Another, not a science student, was inspired to cycle to the opposite coast with a group doing public presentations about what causes global warming. I recently met a girl who was in political science, but switched to ecology and resource management after taking one of my courses -- she was interested in the topics, even though she didn't get top grades, and decided that she wanted a different career. And one guy who had served in the military said that he had a new appreciation for the things he'd come across as a UN peacekeeper, and added that "I had no idea that geography has so much about people in it -- I thought it was just about charts and maps, and this is way more interesting".

Arguably Kerry has thought more about the topics covered in his classes. Bush did get an MBA, but there were long periods when he didn't do much to apply his knowledge (like travelling, or getting active in public issues). He's had plenty of opportunities to expand his understanding, but it seems he just hasn't been interested or motivated enough (and one would think that has ample resources for that). He doesn't seem to want to learn about other countries or about science and technology -- he gets muddled when he tries to talk about these sorts of things.

Some of my own profs have told me that the grading scale was much tougher when Kerry and Bush (and Gore, too) went to college ... basically they would be equivalent to B+ students (even getting some A grades), at many schools today. Someone earlier in the thread pointed out that it's not unusual for students to start out with low grades in the mandatory courses, and improve later on as Kerry did (happened to me and my officemates as well). So it makes sense to look at what they did in their 3rd and 4th years, rather than an overall average as some reports have.

Anyway, if these guys were past students, I wouldn't have any hesitation in writing letters for Kerry and Gore (even if they didn't do that well in my classes), considering their ongoing involvement with the course material. As for Bush ... this semester I dealt with a guy who didn't do too badly in a course I'd taught last year, only I suspected that he'd gotten a lot of help from his work group. That on its own wouldn't have been a bad thing, but he wasn't able to talk about several of the key topics which we'd covered, and at one point pressed me to exaggerate his qualifications for grad school. Ironically, academic dishonesty was one of those topics! I get a similar vibe from Bush, when I read his remarks.


http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/06/07/yale_grades_portray_kerry_as_a_lackluster_student/