U. to implement grade hyperinflation to compete with Harvard, Yale*

The University will soon begin the implementation of a hyperinflation policy in order to make up for ground lost during the "infamous" deflation decade, the University announced this week.

“We eliminated grade deflation in October,” University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 said. “But it just simply wasn’t enough. We are an Ivy League school, after all. These students are incredibly smart. I would venture to say that they are as smart, or perhaps even smarter, than their counterparts at other elite schools like Harvard or Yale. To prove this, they deserve better grades," he said in an interview two days after the policy's announcement; he had been on vacation in the Virgin Islands.

The policy of grade hyperinflation mandates that professors in all departments must give A's or A-minuses to a minimum of 65 percent of their students. The policy also calls for yearly reviews of our peers' grades to make sure that we are not lagging behind.

"We feel like 65 percent is a comfortable first step," Eisgruber explained. "This will put us ahead of Yale and still gives us space to grow, but, right now, the sky is the limit."

Eisgruber said his condolences especially went out to humanities students, who have been the most affected by the University's failure to grade generously.

Eisgruber also noted that the University will not be attaching average grades to a student’s transcript, as Cornell does, nor attaching a letter explaining the new hyperinflation policy.

Economics professor Uwe Reinhardt proposed a different explanation for the decision, resorting to an economic analogy for the University’s decision, comparing grade inflation and deflation to monetary policy done by the Federal Reserve.

“Ten years ago, there was an inflationary gap in the grading market, so the University felt a need to tighten,” he said. “Now, we think we have a recessionary gap, so we need to do some expansionary policy to even it out. Ben Bernanke would be proud of us.”

He added that governments sometimes print money to finance a deficit, a process known as seignorage, and this issuance of good grades can be considered a means of financing deficit of good grades in the past.

Reaction to the new policy from professors was mixed. Professors from engineering and the sciences expressed disdain for the new policy but defended their independent grading standards.

“Telling engineering and science professors that they can’t give out shitty grades is like telling 1920s Irish-Americans that they can’t drink,” he said.

Humanities professors said they were generally indifferent to the new policy, as their grades are so inflated anyway that a policy mandating inflation will not make a huge difference.

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“If the Weimar Republic had mandated a certain value for the German mark, no one would have noticed,” English professor Bertrand Waugh Russell, Jr. said.

Russell noted that even with this policy, University professors would still be giving out around the same percentage of A's as Yale, where A or A-minus grades are awarded to 62 percent of students, and Brown University, where A grades are awarded to two-thirds of the students. He added that he has not taken math for 30 years and does not know how to express two-thirds as a percentage.

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