Word: grade
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...increase of Russian influence in Cuba reached a new grade in mid-December when three Russian warships sailed into Havana’s harbor. This is the first time that the Russian navy has visited Cuba since the end of the Soviet era and represents a clear effort by the Russian Federation to flex its muscle in America’s neighborhood. Nor have Russian moves been limited to the Caribbean. The invasion of South Ossetia last summer and the Bush administration’s plan to construct a NATO-backed missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic...
...After completing eighth grade, O’Brien left Cambridge to pursue the vagrant lifestyle popular among young people in the 1960s...
...grade grubbers go the spoils. And the grade grubbers in this case are rabble-rousing parents in Virginia's Fairfax County. Residents of the high-powered Washington suburb have been battling the school district's tough grading practices; chief among their complaints is that a score of 93% gets recorded as a lowly B+. After forming an official protest group called Fairgrade last year and goading the school board into voting on whether to ease the standards, parents marshaled 10,000 signatures online and on Jan. 22 gathered nearly 500 supporters to help plead their case. After two hours...
...Opponents of Fairgrade counter that any move perceived as encouraging grade inflation could tarnish the school district's sterling reputation. Stuart Gibson, a Justice Department litigator serving his 14th year on the school board, voted for changing the grading system but will continue to oppose lowering the passing grade to 60. And he wants to maintain rigorous standards despite the three dozen e-mails he gets every day from Fairgrade supporters. He notes that in a neighboring district, 36% of students who graduated in June had a weighted GPA of 4.0 or higher. "I moved here from Minnesota...
...Whether grade inflation exists and how it 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...