http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2000/mar/25/20000325-011032-8259r/ excerpts:
Last Sunday, The Washington Post reproduced Mr. Gore’s Harvard transcript as well as his grades and scores at the elite St. Albans high school and later at Vanderbilt University’s divinity and law schools. In a word, the transcripts reveal that Mr. Gore’s post-secondary academic performance was rather dismal, particularly in the field of science.
In introductory economics, the only economics course Mr. Gore ever took, he received a C-
As a Harvard sophomore, scholar Al “earned” a D in Natural Sciences 6 in a course presciently named “Man’s Place in Nature.” That was the year he evidently spent more time smoking cannabis than studying its place among other plants within the ecosystem. His senior year, Mr. Gore received a C+ in Natural Sciences 118.
At Vanderbilt divinity school, Mr. Gore took a course in theology and natural science. The assigned readings included the apocalyptic, and widely discredited “Limits to Growth,” which formed much of the foundation for “Earth in the Balance.” It is said that Mr. Gore failed to hand in his book report on time. Thus, his incomplete grade turned into an F, one of five Fs Mr. Gore received at divinity school, which may well be a worldwide record.
In ... “Inventing Al Gore,” Newsweek correspondent Bill Turque writes that Mr. Gore’s “moribund academic career suddenly gained new energy and direction” at the beginning of his junior year in the fall of 1967. “The English student who plodded through Chaucer and pulled a string of Cs started getting As and Bs, and his academic program began to look more like a preparation for public life.” But as Mr. Turque also notes, it was at the beginning of Mr. Gore’s junior year that “the [Vietnam] War’s shadow lengthened.”
This is when grade inflation really took off. Not only had the Johnson administration announced an end to graduate school deferments, but the U.S. military presence in Vietnam had dramatically increased, reaching nearly 500,000 troops compared to 23,000 in early 1965. Flunking out of undergraduate school meant a visit to the local draft board. Rabidly anti-war professors, who dominated political science faculties across the nation, began handing out Cs for breathing, thus ratcheting-up the entire grading scale. This surely explains part of Mr. Gore’s academic improvement.
Mr. Gore’s high point of academic achievement at Harvard was his 99-page senior thesis, “The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969,” which so impressed his father, then a liberal senator from Tennessee whom voters ousted from office the next year, that he sent it to the Nixon White House.
Presciently and ironically, in his thesis Mr. Gore used as his case study the evolution of the presidential news conference. ... Why prescient and ironic? Because Mr. Gore seems to have learned nothing from his own thesis. Recall the news conference disaster over which he presided when he attempted to legitimize his fund-raising calls from his White House office by declaring not once, but seven times that “no controlling legal authority” had barred him from making those calls. Then again, what would one expect from a law school drop-out who once achieved a D-level grade of 69 in Civil Procedure II?
To be fair, I believe Mister Gore has since read and absorbed several articles about global warming “science” posted on Wikipedia.