Dartmouth Dhall Bandits, Re-Inflated Grades at Princeton, and Columbia's "Dicktation" Graffiti

The quick and dirty about what's going on around the Ancient Eight

Harvard is well-known for grade inflation (#aminusgate), which we can all safely agree is better than grade deflation, a policy Princeton famously has—or rather, had. Earlier this month, faculty members finally voted to repeal this policy, making our peers over in New Jersey breathe a big sigh of relief and stop doing the reading for their sections. The administration figured this policy leads to “additional stress for students” and that it even “affects applications from prospective students.” Gee, maybe they were wondering why they were losing so many cross-admits to Harvard?

This semester, Harvard’s introductory computer science course CS50 broke enrollment records, making it the largest class offered at Harvard in the last five years. Following this, Yale appears to have finally conceded defeat. Yale is currently considering offering CS50 on its own campus—not its own version of CS50, but the exact CS50 that’s taught at Harvard. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, we guess.

Contrary to our upstanding moral compasses (save for the occasional Annenburglar), Dartmouth students have no qualms about stealing food from their dining halls. Theft from dining halls is so bad, as a matter of fact, that the college recently took some desperate measures and roped off the rear entrance of a dining hall and shut its glass doors. Dartmouth Dining Services, meanwhile, is bamboozled by the reason behind these thefts. “I can’t seem to explain it, but there seems to be a correlation between bad behavior and alcohol and drug use,” their Dining Services director said in The Dartmouth's article. Helpful hint, Dartmouth: ever heard of drunchies? While Harvard students can turn to Tasty on a Friday night, Dartmouth students, being in the middle of nowhere, can only resort to pillaging their own dining halls.

Columbia students, on the other hand, live in the artistic and cultural haven that is New York City. It’s only understandable, then, that students try to channel the masterpieces from the Met in their graffiti around the campus walls. A Columbia recently student took it upon herself to roam around the buildings and search for the most interesting works of graffiti. These works include extensive sketches of male genitalia as well as something called the “pineapple man,” a dancing fruit that appears on walls and pipes all around campus. However, the pinnacle of the student street artistry in Columbia pales in comparison to Harvard’s student artwork, in particular the extensive and beautiful graffiti that lines the walls of the tunnels beneath Adams House. Columbia, you ain’t got nothing on us.