Professor Mansfield has been ticking off liberal colleagues for years with articles designed to skewer political correctness. Mansfield began this past semester by announcing that henceforth he will give each student two grades rather than one. The first will be the grade he thinks the student earned. The second, which will go into the student's transcript, will be the higher mark he thinks the student would have received from a more generous grader. 51 percent of the school's undergraduates have A or A-minus averages.
Administrators say they just happen to have a sharp bunch of students.
But he's fighting a trend. For example, at the University of Illinois, A's and B's now account for 80 percent of the grades handed out, compared to just 63 percent in 1967. C's, which accounted for 28 percent of the grades in 1967, now account for only 16 percent. A's alone account for 80 percent of the grades issued. And it's not just colleges.