Word: graded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Braverman, who graduated with the highest grade-point average in his class last year, and who was a first-year student at Yale Medical School, died last December. Police said they found him in the garage of his parents' home about five miles from New Haven and that he died of carbon monoxide poisoning...
...CRUCIAL QUESTIOIN is, of course, what the school system decides to do about students who don't meet the competency level for their grade. If, as officials indicate, they treat deficiencies as the fault of the school or of some particular hitch in the curriculum, the use of standardized tests can do nothing but good. If the scores raise what Mary Lou McGrath, director of elementary education, calls "people's level of awareness of accountability" to students, then results like the reading and writing weakness and the sixth grade dip are useful warning signals about where improvement is necessary...
...course budget, and officials note that the best results in the past have come from long-term aids like better teacher training. An ever present temptation is to get rid of the problem on the surface by "holding back" students till they have attained competency for the grade level. New York City ran into just this problem in 1980 when it created an ironclad regulation for the city's overcrowded, almost completely ineffectual seventh grades: Students could not go on to eighth until they had achieved certain flat scores on the city "idiot tests...
...about standardized tests' imprecision and inherent unfairness; the rule dis-criminatex against inner-city students whose vocabularies were different, against students from poorer families, and so forth. But the more pressing problem turned out to be one of mere practicality. So many students failed to pass seventh grade that the already crowded facilities became almost useless; and a substantial number of students, though tested several years in a row, failed to pass. The presence of 17- and 18-year-old seventh-graders was a dramatic condemnation of a school system that couldn't teach the competencies, and so punished...
...sharp slide in oil prices could be devastating to Mexico. Every $1 cut in the price of Mexico's crude oil, which now sells at $32.50 per bbl. for the highest grade, would cost the country about $550 million in revenues and make it that much harder to meet the estimated $12 billion in foreign interest payments that are scheduled to become due this year...