Word: grades
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Grade inflation" is a fashionable topic of academic conversation these days. The term means different things to different people. To some professors it symbolizes a general tendency toward permissiveness and lax standards throughout the university. Others use the phrase to attack ungraded courses and the pass-fail system. But most teachers agitated over "grade inflation" are troubled that too many undergraduate students are receiving high grades in their courses. If good grades are easy to achieve, they feel, students will work little and learn less. As a result, the value of an undergraduate degree, even from an institution like Harvard...
...good deal of the concern about "grade inflation" derives from simple ignorance of statistics. All college teachers have had to learn about the bell-shaped curve, that symmetrical pattern formed by the grades of a large, representative population, and in the minds of many that frequency distribution, intended to be descriptive, has become normative. Whether a teacher uses a precise formula or a rough estimate, he tends to think that the largest number of grades in his course ought to cluster around an average (a "C"), with roughly equal numbers of grades above and below that average. But these days...
...committee had examined the grade distribution in a number of Gen Ed courses, and found several courses with distributions similar to and higher than that...
...Faculty Council yesterday adopted an amendment to the honors regulations passed in February by the Faculty that in effect calls for a return to the old standards for cum laude and magna degrees, except with a higher minimum grade level...
Under the proposal, unexcused absences and failing grades in any course--whether or not the student took it on a letter-graded basis--would be considered a letter grade...