A month ago I responded to a Wall Street Journal piece in which a Boise State University administrator responds to a professor’s criticism of grade inflation at the school by saying “If we do our jobs, correctly, more students actually should get A’s.” I wrote:

I don’t think preponderance of A’s alone is proof that a professor is “doing his job correctly” ? not when the professor himself is also in charge of the output measure. For one thing, to argue a strict relationship between students’ grades and a professor’s job performance would mean that the rest of the professors on campus (those not teaching ensemble music, radiology, and military science) are not doing their job as well as the professors of those courses. (This fallacy is very similar to judging professors’ effectiveness according to student evaluations, a practice exposed by “Peter Sacks” in 1996 in Generation X Goes to College.)

Here I’d like to follow up my comments with the following. An independent website used by N.C. State students includes a “School Tools” feature that allows students to rate and review professors and classes, and one feature of “School Tools” is a handy page that helps students identify (and presumably avoid) the “Lowest GPA instructor for each department” (i.e., the toughest grader in each department). These would be those whom the BSU (huzzah for euonymy) provost would say are doing their jobs the most incorrectly.

An N.C. State grad myself, I studied under three professors on that list, and I can attest that Holt of the Economics Graduate program, Frauenfelder of Latin, and Hester of English are excellent instructors that students would avoid to the detriment of their own education. In my experience, they were most definitely “doing their jobs,” their relative low grades be [con]d[e]mned.

M. Thomas Hester‘s appearance on this list especially undermines the notion that the professor who awards more A’s is the one who’s really doing his job. Hester is a highly decorated teacher of Renaissance literature at N.C. State. He is a member of the Academy of Outstanding Teachers and has won, among others, the following teaching awards:

? Alumni Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award

? College of Humanities and Social Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award

? The Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor Award

? Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society’s Southeast Region Scholar for 1999-2001

? Holladay Medal for Outstanding Teaching and Research

? UNC Outstanding Teacher Award

? SAMLA Outstanding Teacher Award