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 Rating of Elective Classes in Williams College 





I 



II 





1 



11 





1 



113 







16 



2 



41 





2 



113 







17 



1 



42 





3 



77 



27 



18 



— 1 



56 





4 



41 



—23 



19 



— 2 



6 





5 



39 



23 



20 



— 4 



—11 





6 



39 



—21 



21 



— 5 



89 





7 



24 



3 



22 



— 7 



63 





8 



20 



49 



23 



— 8 



59 





9 



17 



50 



24 



—14 



40 





10 



15 



34 



25 



—17 



95 





11 



13 



20 



26 



—21 



52 





12 



9 



41 



27 



—22 



89 





13 



7 



32 



28 



—30 



114 





14 



6 



58 



29 



—33 



66 





15 



5 



63 



30 



—40 



73 



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 faculty 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- 



