I don’t know, it’s hard to tell who’s under the hoods.
But there was this one Clayton Bixby guy …
How could he be summa cum laude if he had (relatively) low grades? By definition it means his grades are in the top 10%. So even without knowing the specifics of the grades, we know that they were high.
Translation: I cannot counter your arguments, so I choose to stop dealing with you.
FP won’t answer you; he prefers to just keep implying that grades can somehow be influenced by affirmative action or affirmative action-type programs.
I assume you mean magna cum laude.
I think the 10% is current and the standards might have been looser when he was there.
More significantly I think the bigger question in that regard is about the Columbia grades.
The standards might have been tighter when he was there. I’m pretty sure they were. I think it was the top 1% that got MCL, not top 10%.
A) Wouldn’t you be happy if you found out that he got shitty grades? Can’t be too brilliant, after all.
B) If someone got poor grades at Columbia and then went on to graduate in the top 10% of his class at Harvard Law, wouldn’t that suggest that someone’s undergraduate grades are a poor indicator of their future performance potential? If anything, it seems like that would support Harvard’s decision not to place too high of a weight on them.
C) According to wikipedia, summa cum laude has been top 10% since it was instituted at Harvard in the 1870s. Nice insinuation though. :rolleyes:
From the LA Times, June 10, 1999.
(I don’t see where steronz’s claim is stated in his linked cite.)
Ah, that’s what the big question is. I knew something in this discussion had to be significant.
Yup, and all those frothingly liberal professors gave him inflated grades, just out of pity or to meet a quota or, I dunno, some sort of affirmative-actiony undeserved boost up.
Because no way could a black guy ever achieve all that stuff without some AA help, right?
Yeh, it’s blindingly obvious what’s being so coyly insinuated here.
This, for both What The……infinity and F-P. I mean, Rick Perry’s grades were leaked - they were low. Bush’s grades are rumored to be low. Kerry’s grades were low. McCain’s grades were rumored to be low. And none of these “release the transcripts motherfucker!” calls were being made about those rumors and/or leaks.
But “OMG the black guy might have had low grades we must investigate this possibility at once why are the transcripts not available lack of transparency!”
Why, I wonder? What does this discussion, this revelation, do, other than to continue to insinuate that the president does not deserve to inhabit his current position for reasons other than disagreements of policy?
It seems astonishingly ballsy to me for people to insist that this has nothing to do with certain aspects of this president that are different than certain aspects of every other president to this point.
Really? It seems astonishingly *cowardly *to me. Have the courage of your convictions, folks. Say what you mean.
If they said what they meant, no one would give them the attention they crave. People would take them for what they are, racist crackpots slightly to the right of Brother John Birch.
Right, and if Harvard granted honors on a loose generous basis *across the board before 1999, to the point 3 out of 4 graduates made some form of the honors list (notice: meaning cum laude in all its variations; article annoyingly does not tell us where the cutoff for “magna” was under the old loose rules, just the revised one)… then wouldn’t that make it so that you did NOT need to benefit from some special privilege in order to make the honors list? Or does it just make it so we can devalue the academic record of *** every Harvard grad of that time period?
Like someone else said: and the basis for even bringing up the suggestion is…?
…but, wait… either his grades were inflated or they were not, how the heck does the transcript tell us that? It only includes the final grades. And if the honors list threshold is top 70% or if the threshold is 3.00GPA, then it just will NOT include someone whose transcript clearly reads that they’re below the threshold.
I think general campaign promises about “transperancy” are somewhat pertinent. You can pretend that I said it was the exact same thing if you want to.
I’m pretty sure his campaign promises about transparency had absolutely nothing to do with his past private personal records. You can pretend that he said they did if you want to.
This would obviously be true in some cases and not in others. Rgardless, it means that the greek honors mean less than they do under the current tighter system.
It means you can devalue the honors of everyone (other than summa).
I’m not sure what this question means. People like to claim that he’s very accomplished academically. Other people want to see if this is correct. This is SOP on this board in particular for a variety of issues. I’ve never heard anyone raise this type of challenge to other suggestions of this sort.
Did you even read the post you quoted? His grades were not inflated, and you wouldn’t be able to see that from the transcript if they were. (That’s one reason it was so inane for posters to assume anyone is claiming his grades were inflated, assuming that was a legitimate misunderstanding.) The question is whether his achievements were justified by his grades. Seeing the grades would shed some light on that.
It’s pretty obviously disingenuous to claim that “transparency” promises in campaigns for office mean “I’ll give you every aspect of my personal life that you want, regardless of relevancy.” Normal people understand that when a politician talks about “transparency,” they’re referring to the office itself, rather than “crawl up my ass, my wife’s ass, and my children’s asses with a microscope.”
The documents that you seem to want are not relevant, and you know it. They’re just part of the ongoing meme that somewhere, somehow, Obama is not qualified for office due to…something unspecified and nefarious. Which is a dog-whistle.
You can pretend that Obama meant “I’ll release any document anywhere for any reason for any request for any jackhole” when he campaigned on “transparency,” but you’re pretty transparent yourself when you do.
Yeah, call me crazy, but I’m a bit more upset about the lack of transparency in his current administration. You know… in the present, where we all live, and which is affecting us all as we speak?
But no, for the love of God, let’s instead move heaven and earth to find out whether Obama got a C in art history thirty fucking years ago. (Or an A that he only earned for being black.)
What the … !!! : transpArency. transpArency. TRANSP[COLOR=“Blue”]A**RENCY[/COLOR]
…sorry, it’s starting to grate… let Gaudere smite me now…
Except that they WOULD have been justified… by Harvard’s standards. Now whether you or I are to find that the standard is not strict enough or includes some factors that are too subjective or is pretty darn impressive just to meet at all, could be a matter for debate.
Know what, though? I feel it would be a moot debate. And he’s entirely entitled to NOT oblige those who want to have it. He owes them nothing. The debate ought to be on the job he’s doing. (BTW same thing applied to George W’s academics – he had enough of a record of baffling policies and decisions that I never understood the insistence on trying to find some evidence of intrinsic mental inferiority)