Grade Grubbing

Vice President Al Gore got only average grades as a student at a prestigious Washington prep school, in most of his courses at Harvard, and during brief graduate studies at Vanderbilt.

Citing academic records of both men, the Washington Post reported Sunday that Gore entered Harvard with an 1355 SAT score, while his Republican rival George W. Bush arrived at Yale with a 1206 SAT total.

Once in college, both men posted similarly mixed academic records.

In his sophomore year at Harvard, "Gore's grades were lower than any semester recorded on Bush's transcript from Yale," said the paper.

The Post reported it obtained Gore's transcripts independently - and noted some of the information had been cited previously by a Newsweek writer in a biography of Gore.

Bush's Yale grades were first reported last November by The New Yorker magazine.

At Harvard, Gore received one D, one C-minus, two C's, two C-pluses, and one B-minus in his sophomore year, placing him in the lower fifth of his class for a second consecutive year.

The Vice President's high school record at St. Albans school in Washington, D.C. was sprinkled heavily with C's and B's, with an occasional A.

"You have here a boy who shows a lot of potential," John C. Davis, a retired teacher and assistant headmaster at St. Albans, told the Post after reviewing Gore's achievement test scores and grades.

"He was as a rule a hard worker, but he wasn't really interested in certain things and when he wasn't so interested he tried faithfully to do what he was supposed to, though not necessarily very well."

Davis, who wrote Gore's recommendation to Harvard, said he wasn't concerned about his transcript full of C's and B's and his middle rank in the class at St. Albans.

"In Al's case, he was what Harvard most wanted at that time," Davis said. "What they wanted was competent academic performance plus future potential."

"Plus they were very impressed by the fact that he was a political son. Colleges like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are just as excited to get important sons as top academic scholars. They want our boys as much as our boys want them."

"And Al was captain of the football team. Any nice big boy was welcome if he played football."

Despite a lackluster start at Harvard, Gore earned a B, a B-plus, and an A-minus in three government courses.

And the future senator, vice president, and presidential candidate gave a strong presentation of his senior government thesis: the impact of television on the presidency.