Making the Grade in College

Re “College Freshmen Experts at Getting A’s,” Jan. 27: My son, a junior in high school, has been taking honors classes since middle school. In order to even be considered for the colleges he would like to go to, he is expected to take Advanced Placement classes and do well in them. He is active in his school’s music program, and this is a good thing because extracurricular activities play a major part when being considered for college.

During tours of the UC campuses he is disheartened to hear that the average incoming GPA is 3.8. He has a GPA of 3.2 and struggles to keep it there.

Please let us know how students are becoming “experts at winning A’s.” We could use the advice. If anything is becoming “inflated” it is the expectations for the 17-year-old kid and what he or she has to do to get into college.

Laureen Keough

Los Angeles

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Is it part of the dumbing down of American education that A students should feel their hard work is not valued?

There is no failure in understanding what a system requires. That’s what creates good team members, students who set goals and attain them and students who understand that they are entering a point in their lives when they will be judged more on their performance and less on their potential.

The reason these students are making A’s is not because they “jump through the hoops to get the biscuit” or because they are “adept at ‘outsmarting the system.’ ” These students would make A’s in any setting. They are simply A students.

It is a disservice to hard-working students to suggest that there is something wrong with the system simply because others can’t excel within it the way they would like.

Nicolas Wieder

Los Angeles

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The only way to find out if today’s college students deserve the A’s they uniformly get is to require a well-designed exit exam before they receive their undergraduate degrees. As things stand now, grade inflation has made objective assessment impossible. Maybe students are more talented and more hard-working than in the past, but how do we know?

One thing is certain, however. College administrators would never readily consent to any such test because they each want the public to believe that their school is the best. A test might prove that colleges are not doing their job.

Walt Gardner

Los Angeles