It appears Barack Obama may have got worse high school grades than George W. Bush after new evidence showed the current president was among a college class with poor average SAT scores.
Doubts about the supposedly superior intellect of Barack Obama were first raised after he refused to release his academic record.
Barack Obama has also made some factual errors during his time in the job – although he is still a very long way behind his gaff-prone predecessor.
But now it has emerged that Barack Obama was among a 1981 intake of transfers to New York’s Columbia University that was at the time branded one of the worst ever.
The president, who moved from Occidental Community College in Los Angeles, was among 67 students whose average combined math and verbal score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test is a 1,100, according to a report obtained by Breitbart News.
By comparison, George W. Bush – who earned a history degree from Yale in 1968 – got 1206 out of a possible 1600 points in the same test he took at Andover boarding school in Massachusetts.
If Barack Obama, who majored in political science at Columbia, were near the average of that year, it would mean he had worse high school grades than a president derided by many as the dumbest in history.
Of course, Barack Obama went on to distinguish himself by going on to earn the second highest honor in a graduate law degree at Harvard .
And he became the first black president of the prestigious legal journal, the Harvard Law Review.
Barack Obama also taught at the University of Chicago for twelve years – with eight years spent as senior lecturer in constitutional law.
But, the possibility that Barack Obama got lower high school scores than George W. Bush, would take some of the shine off his image as an intellectual heavyweight.
In his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama describes himself as an unfocused high school student whose mother criticized him for being a “loafer”.
Barack Obama also describes his attitude toward his studies at Occidental as ‘indifferent’ and called himself a “bum” who was notorious for partying.
However, despite his apparent lack of focus, he was able to win a place at Columbia.
Of the 450 students applied to transfer to the Ivy League university in 1981, only 67 were admitted, according to the Columbia Spectator.
This compared to 650 applicants just four years before, signifying that those who wanted to study there has lower grades.
A November 18, 1981 article in the Columbia Spectator revealed the SAT average for the transfer intake that year.
It stated: “On paper at least, the quality of the students accepted [as transfers] has declined along with the number of applicants, the officials say.”
In that story, Robert Boatti, the then Assistant Dean of Admissions, also attributed the drop in transfer application to the College’s policy of requiring transfer students to take courses in its core curriculum and to the limited availability of financial aid for them.
“He had said that many come from community colleges, rather than the nation’s top schools.
“Even the unhappiest people don’t transfer from Harvard,” Robert Boatti added.
