My partner recently watched ‘Berkeley in the Sixties’ and couldn’t help wondering whether the student activism of the day affected the general grade point average.
Clarification, please.
Do you mean over the entire nation as a whole? Or do you mean did the students that were involved in the protests have lower (or higher) GPAs? Or…
I heard a story that the draft in the 60’s caused grade inflation, because professors hated to give a kid a bad grade if it meant he’d be eligible for the draft.
I am sure that spending lots of time protesting all over the place, getting high, and being a general flake would affect your grade-point average however that doesn’t seem to be question. Are you asking if protesting in general would directly affect your GPA? I have no idea how that would work. A GPA is simply an average of your grades in your classes. For that to be affected, some central authority would have to target individual professors and order them to modify your grades based on some unknown criteria. That would be one very bizarre conspiracy. All students have a centrally managed transcript of their grades that they can access for life to apply to things like graduate school. I have never seen an entry for GPA deductions based on extracurricular activity like protesting.
Where would that entry go and how would the math work?
On preview, I assumed that the question referred to a lower GPA. I now realize that it might have meant a higher GPA. Still, I have no idea how that would work either.
I don’t know about the general average, but in 1970, when my mom was in college, they had to shut her college down due to riots (it was Northern Illinois University). They allowed the students enrolled at that time to take two of their classes pass/fail with no repercussions.
My mom was very happy about this, as it meant she could pass/fail psychology and philosophy, both of which she hated.
I interpreted the OP this way: did the mass protests in the 60’s cause the average GPA of the entire student body of various universities where student protests occurred to be lower than they were/are at other times, when students were (presumably) more involved in studying than in protesting?
Is that what you were asking, Ritter? Or did I misunderstand?
My GPA tanked
I left college eventually to pursue a life in the construction industry
We got a better deal than this. We could accept whatever grade we had achieved up to the time the college shut down. (For those that don’t remember, the shootings at Kent State took place on May 4, 1970. Shortly after, 4 million students walked out of classes at hundreds of colleges. Wiki says 900 schools closed, and that included most major names. In those days, most colleges held classes until mid-to-late June, so a good month or more of school remained. Colleges had about 900 different solutions as to what to do with the missing time.)
I had the highest average in my Symbolic Logic course, so skipping the final was an eminently logical decision, proving my ability. 
Except for times when an entire college shut down, however, the number of students who were so actively participating in protests to the exclusion of schooling was always a minimum. I’m pretty sure this was true even at places like Berkeley. The most active activists did drop out if not flunk out, but the overall effect would have washed out in the rounding.
I was active in the protests in the late '60s and I maintained a decent grade point. When the university shut down in the wake of the shootings by the National Guard at Kent State, my professors let me write research papers instead of taking the finals scheduled. I did so.
Guys, I forgot that I posted this thread! Please accept my apologies for not returning sooner and thanks for the answers. I think my partner was wondering whether there were any comparison studies done on American college grades against previous, less turbulent periods. The pass/fail option was news to me!