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| Ben Stein |
It’s unclear how well he did as an undergraduate, although he was not a distinguished student. Obama refuses to release his transcript from his undergraduate years. [We do know, however, that his last two years in high school were a a "haze," as he put it in his book, Dreams of my Father. We also know that he "he did drugs enthusiastically" during that two year period, a habit he continued to feed through his years at Occindental College]. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Obama was not well-known among classmates after he transferred to Columbia University from Occidental College in the early 1980s. The article quotes a former roommate who states that Obama’s performance improved after he stopped taking drugs (which Obama has admitted to openly). Since Obama did not graduate with honors, that means his GPA was between a 2.0 and a 3.3 — although, since he was admitted to Harvard Law School, it’s hard to imagine his [high school] GPA was much lower than a 3.3 [although, conversely, it is hard to imagine a GPA of much higher than a 2.0 if he attended class sparingly, did drugs "enthusiastically," drank frequently and considered his last two years 'a haze.' We do know that graduated from a prep school in Hawaii in 1979. He came to this private school from Indonesia, as a 5th grade student]
Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983
with a degree in political science. He specialized in international relations.
Law school was
another story for Obama. He graduated magna cum laude from
Harvard Law School (the second highest honor available) in 1991. He also
was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, a very
prestigious honor. [Please note that "magna cum loude"
marks the top 10 or 12 percent of a particular class and is not all that
unusual. His SAT scores were so bad [we assume] that
they have been hidden from review, all these years. By contrast,
his nemesis, George W Bush, scored 1206 out of 1,600 on
his SAT and had an estimated 125 I. Q. While he was the
first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he managed to survive
that experience without having written a single paper of note. Apparently
he simply managed the Review, but did a good of that.
After graduation,
he taught Constitutional law (Process 101, Racism and the Law, and Equal
Protection) from 1992 through 2004. He never applied for tenure and only
taught part-time, during summer sessions, teaching three courses per
summer. He did not author legal scholarship and served 8 years as
Illinois State Senator during this 12 year period as summer school teacher.
WASHINGTON (CNN)
-
Earlier this year,
President Barack Obama's State of the Union addressed scored below the current
congressional average. As pointed out by the University of Minnesota's Smart
Politics, the president's 2012 State of the Union address earned an 8.4 grade
level. This was not Obama's lowest rated speech; his 2011 State of the Union
address earned an 8.1, the second lowest State of the Union address even given.
"With three
addresses under his belt, President Obama has the lowest average Flesch-Kincaid
score for State of the Union addresses of any modern president," read the
University of Minnesota report. "Obama's average grade-level score of 8.4
is more than two grades lower than the 11.1 grade average for the other 67
addresses written by his 12 predecessors."
And while the average
American speaks around an 8th or 9th grade reading level, some of history's
most prominent documents were written at much higher levels. According to the
Sunlight report, the Constitution was written at a 17.8 level, the Declaration
of Independence at a 15.1 grade level and the Federalist Papers at a 17.1
level. [Source: KMBC,com]
End notes:
Sources
used in this report:
Text
combines: EDU
Report / Midknight Review editorial notes/KMBC and Wikipedia for his
education record and teaching career.
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