My belated take on Bush’s and Kerry’s Yale grades:
One question struck me about even the one issue that people discussed about the Kerry release: his Yale transcript. The press reports compared Bush’s grades for 3 years to Kerry’s for 4 years, yet both Kerry and Bush were depicted as starting poorly and improving over the 4 years. If one excludes Kerry’s last year average of 81, and compares the first three years only, then from the rounded numbers reported by the Globe, Kerry’s average would be about 74.3 and Bush’s would be about 77, a somewhat bigger difference than reported. Of course, there could have been a little bit of grade inflation in the two year difference (though probably not much).
According to a Google cache of a discussion list (sorry, my attempts to link failed), the grades for Bush’s last year (1967-68) were reported by the New Yorker in 1999 as 6 High Passes and 4 Passes. My experience at Yale starting in 1970 was that Passes when instituted were supposed to be the normal grade combining most Bs and Cs, but within a few years at least, a Pass became equivalent to a C, a High Pass to a B, and an Honors (perhaps called “Superior” in 1967-68) equivalent to an A. For summarizing grades for LSAC (law school) transcripts, that was the conversion used in 1973 at least: Pass=C and High Pass=B. So if Bush’s last year were converted to the same numerical system used his first three years, then he would have had a 4-year average at least a point higher: 78.
One of my first blogging posts (What Kerry was doing at Yale) was about two different accounts of Kerry’s years at Yale, both probably with more than a grain of truth in them.
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