Our Purpose

“…no one can presume to know who is teaching what to whom.”
–NCPI report page 22, October 2003.”

“The academic transcript has not had validity for the last twenty years.”
–Member of the Consultant and Evaluators Board, The Higher Learning Commission.
Personal communication, October 2003. Name withheld for reasons of respect.

We seek to establish meaningful standards in higher education through honest and equitable evaluation of learning in college coursework. We believe that evaluation should be based, in most cases, on textbook content (as well as additional learning sources such as assigned outside readings, etc) as defined in master syllabi and presented to students in course syllabi and should result in consistent presentation of the extent of course content mastery on the academic transcript regardless of the institution or program of delivery through which course work is completed. We believe that Academic Assessment has reached the point that will readily permit achieving this goal. However, grade inflation coupled to a decline in meaningful standards (commonly termed “dumbing down”) together with decreased incentive has created a situation that seriously erodes meaningful and appropriate standards in higher education and has led to the increasingly common view that the academic transcript has lost its validity. The academic transcript is what students take with them after graduation in order to show potential employers or graduate & professional schools what skills they have attained through their efforts in higher learning. The cost of the academic transcript, in the form of tuition, is steadily rising and can easily exceed twenty thousand dollars. Grade inflation is somewhat analogous to monetary inflation. The higher course grades go, the less they are worth. Society does adjust to periodic bouts of monetary inflation which simply continue without a forseeable upper limit. However, the GPA does have an upper limit, and that is 4.0.

For these simple reasons, we invite students, faculty, and concerned citizens to join this grass roots effort dedicated to restoring validity and respect to the evaluation of learning as presented on the academic transcript.