Is an A- grade average laudable for a Culture and Politics major, yet grounds for suspicion if obtained by an Accounting major? Should business students hang their heads in shame for accepting signing bonuses or large starting salaries? Of course not.

Different programs of study must be evaluated by different means. Different passions and goals will take people down different paths that reward people in different ways.

The recent satires of the McDonough School of Business published in these pages paint a harsh stereotype of its students yet fail to deliver criticism where it is due. The problems that face the business school are much more subtle than the lampoons of THE HOYA’s April Fools issue or Josh Zumbrun’s recent column (“Hungering for a Cause,” March 22, 2005, A3). These pieces flow from the false assumption that the MSB’s grades are grossly inflated. Yet their flaws do not end there.

Unpublished data from the Georgetown Office of Planning and Institutional Research provided conditionally for the purposes of this viewpoint by the MSB Dean’s office reveals the real situation of grade inflation at Georgetown. It is the School of Foreign Service, not the MSB, which has the highest average GPA of the four undergraduate schools.

Yet perhaps more telling, OPIR’s data, which unfortunately cannot be printed in its entirety, shows that all four of Georgetown’s schools cluster very tightly together on the GPA scale — in its upper reaches. Perhaps we are all receiving grades that are a bit higher than we really deserve: after all, a B+ is actually below average at Georgetown.

Zumbrun, himself an SFS senior, lashes out in his column against MSB grade inflation and the perceived injustice of big signing bonuses and lavish Wall Street salaries. Ironically, his second point best disproves the credibility of the first.

The strong demand for MSB students at major financial institutions and the impressive price these firms are willing to pay to acquire them proves the value of an MSB education. If employers felt that MSB classes were all fluff and something we simply did to fill the time between four-day bouts of drinking, they would hire students from any one of our numerous competitor schools. JP Morgan hired 14 MSB seniors last year — I guess the 7 they hired in 2003 and 9 in 2002 must have worked out pretty well for them.

Zumbrun is wrong to link inflated grades to big signing bonuses when you consider the statistics included in the 2004 Senior Survey published by the MBNA Career Center: the MSB has the lowest average GPA of the three big schools yet by far the highest starting salary.

The report reveals some logical connections between the undergraduate schools and their salaries. Of course MSB seniors, whose favorite employers are Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch, are pulling in $11,000 more per year on average than SFS students whose top destinations include the Peace Corps and Teach for America.

When we choose our majors and career paths we do so with the knowledge of where they might take us. Whether it is fair that educational volunteers are not valued (in terms of their salaries) as highly as investment bankers should make you question our society, not our business school.

And despite the evidence I list above that the MSB is performing well, the simple truth is that it could be doing much better.

There is a lack of stable leadership. In my four years at Georgetown, the MSB has been led by three different Deans and the search for a fourth continues. The result has been a loss of direction — a lack of vision as to what the MSB will be in three, five or 10 years.

For a school that employs an army of adjunct professors, a practice justified by the need for faculty who have real-world experience, there are not sufficient safeguards in place to ensure their quality. Midterm evaluations of professors and the publishing of their scores online are necessary for just this purpose.

Professors’ expectations are often too low. Some force us to stretch ourselves beyond merely understanding a concept or skill and delve into their applications and nuances — names like Doran, Levy and Emmons come to mind — yet so many others do not.

The MSB must certainly face these challenges, but it deserves greater respect than the editors and columnists of THE HOYA have paid it. If the school is to be critiqued in these pages, it should be done with insight, not stereotype.