<p>Whatever you think, it happened, I was there. I admitted it was quite awhile ago, would it help the overall credibility for me to say this was during the Vietnam conflict, when you could potentially be drafted if you didn’t maintain “satisfactory” grades? Yes it seems that impetus had the effect of INCREASING the pressure to get good grades (despite the notion that many professors would probably decrease such pressure if it served to stymie the government’s attempt to widen the war, since it was obviously not well received politically on campus). I even had classmates then who just dropped out and started completely over at other schools so they could get into a “decent” grad school (it paid off rather handsomely for some of them too). The curious thing is whenever I hear someone talk about grades back then they refer to grade INFLATION during that war, which is either just unintentionally inaccurate or else they don’t want to let out how totally callous they were about grading policy. I had solid 800 achievement scores going in there and studied as hard as I could and my GPA was totally savaged, as kind of a “booby prize” they did let me study for and earn the “non-research” master’s degree. I’m being completely truthful about what happened to me (and my memory is accurate too), I’d be very disturbed if my credibility was seriously in doubt after all the pain I went through.</p>