DISTRIBUTION OF COLLEGE CREDITS 



407 



grades and low grades assigned to him. Thus, for example, instructor 

 number 4 has the high rating of 41 in the quality of his students and the 

 low rating of — 23 in the assignment of grades. Instructor number 26, 

 on the contrary, has the low rating of — 21 in quality of students and 

 the high rating of 52 in grades assigned. In other words, he has a con- 

 spicuously large proportion of the students whose general scholarship is 

 low, and to these poor students he awards a conspicuously large pro- 

 portion of high grades. Many a teacher would be surprised to discover 

 his standing on such a scale, and the college administrator who under- 

 takes to deal with such discrepancies, through discussion with individual 

 members of the faculty, will do well to provide himself with a quanti- 

 tative presentation of the facts. 



TABLE V 

 A Ratlnq of Electivx: Ciasses in Wiluaks CTollegk 



Such regulation will be resented by many college teachers as an in- 

 fringement on their rights. But academic freedom that allows each 

 member of a faculty to do as he pleases in matters that reach far be- 

 yond the interests of his own department is intolerable license. As 

 President Eliot has said : 



A faculty can properly criticize the results of any professor's, or other 

 instructor's, work as they appear in certain easily visible ways. Among such 

 visible evidences are . . . the resort of obviously incompetent or uninterested 

 students to nis courses; examination papers of a trivial or pedantic sort; 

 uniform high grades or uniform low grades returned by the professor; an 

 extraordinary number of distinctions earned in his courses; or an extraordinary 

 number of rejections and failures. These are legitimate subjects of inquiry by 

 a faculty committee or by faculty officials, and can be dealt with by a faculty 

 without impairing just academic freedom. The knowledge that this power of 

 revision resides in a facility is a valuable control over individual eccentricities. 



It is sometimes said that " there are usually some courses in a uni- 

 versity which, from year to year, secure only an inferior grade of 

 pupils, and other lines of work which, for various reasons, secure a dis- 



