What's up with that? Nosy about grades

Friday, December 4, 2009

There’s a right and wrong way to ask others about their grades. If you received a high grade, you should only ask someone that you suspect earned the equivalent. A person not to ask: The guy who shows up to class bimonthly and wears backwards hats with the Harvard insignia, despite pulling a 0.76 GPA.

After asking the question, if you find that your interview subject received a substantially lower grade than what you originally thought, then it’s polite to lower yours by a couple of percentage points if the question is posed to you. Or you could just be the epitome of my column’s title and brag.

— Boultinghouse is a Girard sophomore in journalism and history.

Honestly, I’m not even nosy about my own grades. If a professor or instructor says, “E-mail me if you want an update on your grade,” I think, “Really? I have to write a whole e-mail? I don’t want to have to do a whole new assignment just to see my grade.”

You might say this makes me lazy, and you’d be 100 percent correct. I just don’t want to exert the effort necessary to see something I might not even want to see. And we all know that old expression: “A watched grade never goes up.” I just know that the moment I actually check my grade, it will fall from my assumed A+ to depths previously unknown.

— Nichols is a Stilwell junior in creative writing.

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