<p>Yale Grades Portray Kerry as a Lackluster student</p>
<p>His 4-year average on par with Bush’s
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | June 7, 2005</p>
<p>WASHINGTON – During last year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences.</p>
<p>But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.</p>
<p>In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.</p>
<p>Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D’s in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.</p>
<p>Kerry had four grades of “D” in his Freshman year despite having attended some of the best prep schools available. Kerry is hardly the genius Democratics wanted the U.S. to believe.</p>
<p>Maybe so, but Kerry was a better soldier, a man of integrity who put his life on the line. They may been the same as students, but certainly not as patriots.</p>
<p>Kerry must have really improved his last three years if he was able to bring up his average after 4 D’s freshman year.
My husband dropped out of school after his freshman year with a card full of incompletes. He was busy protesting the Vietnam war, as well as dating me, working, and just about everything except studying.
When he went back, he finished in two years and was offered a full fellowship to grad school at Princeton.<br>
I don’t think a bad year says anything about one’s intelligence. Grades (even Bush’s) don’t say much about intelligence. Obviously, neither student was applying himself.</p>
<p>My flip flops are in the garage right next to trash can (in my day we called it garbage can; in one of my previouse lives we called it rubbish bin) where Kerry threw his integrity. If Kerry likes Botox injections, he probably likes to wear thongs. Where is that paparazzi when you need them?</p>
<p>Oh, I don’t think they would have needed to wait to get honors. JFK graduated from Harvard 25 years before GWB or Kerry went to college.</p>
<p>“[JFK] was an average student at Harvard, never earning an A, but mostly B’s and C’s, with a single D in a sophomore history course. He graduated cum laude from Harvard with a degree in international affairs in June 1940…”</p>
<p>The fact that Kerry ran on his military service but didn’t release his military records until now (which is why we now know his grades) says all you need to know about his integrity. The man’s major accomplishment in life was marrying two rich women.</p>
(and I agree!) There just isn’t a lot of “there, there”.) In the immortal words of Clara Pella, “Where’s the beef?”</p>