Word: gibson
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...Complaint: Last December, Rachel Gibson and her family of eight (including small children), were booked on a flight home to Buffalo from Orlando, departing at 6:11 p.m. with a connection in Atlanta. Because their flight wasn't until evening, the family figured they'd be able to spend the day at Disney World...
...Outcome: Gibson thinks that her family getting booted to an earlier flight was about one thing: cash. She suspects that AirTran moved her to the earlier, less-desirable - and cheaper, by $120 per ticket - flight in order to free up seats and sell pricier tickets on her original flight...
...Gibson's foes argue that when you're talking about some of the best schools in the country, regular statistical rules don't apply. In 2007, for instance, Fairfax County's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology produced 158 semifinalists in the prestigious National Merit scholarship competition - more than any other high school - and boasted the highest average SAT score in the country. Yet out of 432 seniors that year, according to McLaughlin, only 16 graduated with straight A's. "They happen to attend a school that has a large percentage of bright, high-performing students," she says...
...affects students has been debated at least since 1894, when a committee at Harvard declared that A's and B's were awarded "too readily." Princeton in 2004 became the only Ivy League school to adopt a grade-deflation policy, including quotas for A's. To skeptics like Gibson, grades should be guides to help students see where they can improve, not rubber stamps to confirm a smart kid's hunch that he or she is smart or gold stars on a résumé. "Grades don't only exist to be reported to college-admissions officers," he says...
...Despite the apparent victory for Fairgrade, in the end both sides still have to manage their expectations. Gibson recalls an e-mail he got from one parent. "It said, 'My daughter's a solid C student, and if you don't change the grading scale, she's never going to get into the University of Virginia,' " he says, referring to the state's highly selective flagship public university. "I'm thinking, No, we're going to have to change the grading scale a lot." After all, the goal is achieving fairness, not fantasy...