My College Transcript

There are very few ways in which I can empathize with G.W. Bush and D.J. Trump, but one of them is a certain reticence about our college transcripts. As MIT Admissions Director Pete Richardson once said to me, at a time when MIT didn’t actually keep or publish class rankings, “Well, Paul, someone has to be last in their class.” I was the only member of the class of 1974 whose verbal SAT score was higher than his math score—in part because 2/3 of my classmates scored 800 on the SAT Math. Not me, obviously.

It took nearly 30 years for someone to ask for my transcript; it was the California State Teacher Credentialing commission, which has a requirement that teachers must have a 2.5 undergraduate GPA. Because I flunked 18.02 (second-term calculus) twice and management accounting once, and because all my junior and senior grades were pass/fail because of the Undergraduate Studies Program I was in at Sloan, I didn't make the cut. The venerable Prof. Jay Forrester, inventor of magnetic-core computer memory and Sloan School professor, headed the program along with Prof. Leo Moore.

"You see I graduated, from MIT, right?" I asked the credentialing commission on the phone.

"Yes sir. Rules are rules."

"Turn all my pass grades into Cs, and I qualify to be a teacher."

"We can't do that. Someone from MIT will have to write to the commission."

Prof. Forrester, god bless him, was still alive in his 80s, still in his office 20 hours a week, still answering his email. "Just draft the letter and I'll be happy to send it," he said. "But just one thing."

"What's that?"

"I can't turn them into Cs. The USP was an honors program, so I will have to convert them all into As."

Which is what he did, which is why I was able to teach 8th grade US History for 11 years.

Comments

[Craig Reynolds]

Nice story. I recently had the pleasure of corresponding for the first time with Prof. James D. Murray FRSE FRS, applied mathematician, author of the multi-volume set “Mathematical Biology,” etc., etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Murray said he was still alive, at age 89, and I was pleasantly surprised to find him still active and answering his own email. I got to tell him about a recent publication that built upon his work on “coat patterns” (which in turn built on Alan Turing’s last paper): https://mgmalheiros.github.io/research/leopard/

I also had the misfortune to revisit my MIT transcript, in 2007 when I made my most concrete attempt (of several) to return to grad school to pursue a PhD. It was not a pretty picture, and probably one of several reasons I was deemed “not Stanford material.”

[Kent Peterman]

That is a great story. So there CA credentialling. You are no match for MIT or the renowned, one and only, Paul (Pauli) Schindler.

[Lee Giguere]

You're not totally alone in the SAT department as my verbal score was higher than my math also.