John Kerry: C Average Student [Politics]

During the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry was protrayed as the intellectual candidate, by his supporters, and George W. Bush was portrayed as a dunce who breezed through college on C's.

The Boston Globe reports that, in fact, John Kerry got about the same grades as Bush did in college--he graduated with a 4 year average or 77, which on a 100 point scale comes out to be a C.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.