[Verginius Rufus]

It was around 1969 that student evaluations of professors came in, I think, and that's probably connected to the grade inflation of subsequent years. Hard graders got bad evaluations which the administration could use to deny tenure to tenure-track faculty. I don't know how often that actually happened but it made tenure-track faculty worry about low scores on evaluations.

The media made a big deal about GWB's GPA at Yale (how his transcript got leaked was never explained)--B's and C's--but that was before grade inflation. And Kerry's and Gore's GPAs were not much different from Bush's.

[Theodore R.]

Absolutely, at universities those false student evaluations are the holy grail. One cannot survive on the faculty without inflating grades.