1. First-year night students carry a class and half less of a load than day students. The half is half of a 4-credit class, and thus it could realistically be seen as two classes less, one three credits and one two credits. Either way, it's five credits less a semester, so I don't know how you come up with one less class since there are no five credit classes. Making it seem that carrying 150% of a night students' load is the trivial matter of an extra class is plainly wrong.

2. You worked 40 hours a week. Good for you... if I were an employer, I would highly value the fact that you worked while getting good grades. But what bearing does it have on whether your curve is easier or harder? From that perspective, the fact that a number of people work full time makes the competition easier, not harder. Yes, from the point of view of an individual who works a full time job, competing against people who do not work is, of course, a huge handicap. But a section with a number of people working full time jobs almost by definition has to make the competition easier, because if they were not working they would have more time to study. That would reduce overall exam performance.

And as far as whether the predominance of older students in the night section makes it more difficult to compete, remember that the day section has older, more experienced students as well, but the difference is that they are not working full time. Most of the older students in the night section have jobs.

2. I'm not sure what scale you are using that has determined that the differences are "small," particularly since I, at least, am not sure where the statistics comparing the two are to be found. The fact remains that there are differences, and that there are people in the night section who are there because the school only offers them admission to the night section based on their entrance scores. Entirely coincidentally, I am sure, is the fact that they do not have to report part-time student's scores to US News & World Report. Maybe they actually do, but they don't have to (and if they do, they are pretty dumb for doing so).

3. You wrote: "But the real failure in this idea comes from some implication that evening students remain a segregated lot throughout, which simply isn't the case. Of my original evening section, there were maybe 15 to 18 students left who were strictly evening students when I started. You want to know where my best grades came from? When I started taking classes with full-time day students."

I don't know what implication you are referring to. Yes, night students eventually take classes with day students. And you have provided us with anecdotal evidence that your best grades came when you mingled with day students. Why should we extrapolate from that that this is a common experience? Unless you have data showing that *as a group* night students get better grades than day students in the same classes, I'm not sure what your point is here, and I'll stick to my hypothesis that better entering scores plus more time trumps lower entering scores and less time.

5. Vigor. My experience as a night section tutor was that a number of the working people (not all, but some) were simply looking to pass, not excel. By week 3 of first semester there were a number of people, both working and not, who were copping to not having done the reading when cold-called. That is simply unheard of in the day section. It had nothing to do with people being respectful of others. Rather, it was just a simple matter of lackadaisical preparation. Many people would approach me and ask me how Fre-wald expected them to work full time and prepare in the manner she expected them to at the same time. I had to admit: I did not know. The truth is that I found the night students woefully underprepared compared to my section-mates. Yes, this is entirely based on my observation, but confirms the general hypothesis (high scores + more time > lower scores + less time).

Are there unprepared people in the day sections? Of course. And while I understand you would like to have some recognition of your individual achievement of working and getting good grades, you have still not given me any reasons to believe why doing less work and at the same time competing against *groups* of people who have lower scores and less time available to them is harder than having a heavier burden while competing against people with higher scores and more time available. Objectively, exam performance is going to be reduced *as a group*. Might some individuals perform very well, even better than many or all days students? Sure. But not in the aggregate.

And it is all beside the point. I am not complaining; rather, I am simply offering a counterpoint to your perception that this one anomaly of being lumped in with the day students is terribly unfair to the part-timers. Most day students perceive being lumped in with the night students as sort of unfair, but generally accept it as simply one of those things. You can't control for everything... some things just give particular groups advantages (first-year day students are also lumped in with part-time day students, who take the same classes and exams but just carry 5 less credits than the rest of the section. But you don't hear that complaint nearly as much as you hear about how unfairly the night students have been treated by the GPA adjustment). I agree with you that there is a disadvantage given to some night students because of the GPA adjustment, but it is so slight that it hardly bears all of this gnashing of teeth. As a friend once told me, pass and move on.