Grade Inflation with E Halliday MA Principle of St Chad’s College Durham University 1992

Academics and teachers are a curious breed obsessed with grades.  To them good grades are everything…  What they don’t tell you, of course, is that 27 years later those grades will have been made laughable by grade inflation. 

It’s easy to say this but it’s harder to prove this …or it was until the other day when I unearthed by accident this letter to myself from E Halliday MA the Principle of St Chad’s College Durham University written in 1992.

A number of things seem remarkable reading this letter in retrospect.  Firstly E Halliday MA has typed under the University Coat of Arms “EXEMPT CHARITY” in upper case.  Was this the University motto I wonder? or was E Halliday MA who asked me a lot of questions about my freelance writing career worried that I would twig he was a freelancer too and grass him up to the inland revenue?  The mind boggles.

Did I meet with E Halliday MA at all?  I mention this because although his name appears on the top of the letter it is appended there by sticky label underneath which can clearly be seen the name of the previous Principle of St Chad’s College Durham University David Jasper MA PhD BD. 

I suppose David Jasper MA PhD BD must have seen himself pretty settled in the role of Principle of St Chad’s College Durham for all eternity because he clearly had his own name written on so much of the University stationary that E Halliday MA had to use sticky labels to cover it up. 

Was E Halliday MA on an economy drive or did he simply get some form of schadenfreude in sticking a sticky label over his predecessor’s name? 

Who can tell?

I remember going for the interview distinctly because I had to stay overnight at the college in order to get the feel of the place.  However, while the idea was clearly that we should spend all night in the college there being no prohibition on going out on the town alone I did the latter …only to discover that there was not much of a town to go out on.  There was a cathedral on top of a hill, some shops that were closed and it was very cold.  I ain’t spending 3 years here I thought… not that they weren’t nice people.  Apart from the lecturer in the Physics department who barked at me while watching me fill in a short test form “You should know the answers before you come here!”  Unfortunately I didn’t and so the Russell Group was immediately formed to prevent any repetition of such an educational disaster.

But most interestingly of all …the offer in 1992 was that one could get on the course with CCC whereas 27 years later it seems that A*A*A is required.  It seems to me then that university offers increase by an alphabet letter every 13.5 years.  The question is what will happen to this system in 13.5 years time in 2032 …?  For now we’re at A*A*A there is no higher alphabet letter to go to?  And no more *s save one.  Perhaps then like car number plates the system should start going back down the alphabet again until it reaches Z*Z*Z* before going back up to A*A*A again…?