Word: grades
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That Harvard has a grade inflation problem is news to no one. What is surprising, though, is that this issue has persisted despite its acknowledgment by students, professors, and the media. This may be because the obvious solution—grade deflation—is both unpalatable and difficult to implement. Instead, a more positive way to combat grade inflation and reward students for exemplary academic work would be to raise the grading scale to include A-pluses...
...Grade deflation is tricky to execute because it is by nature a negative academic move. In 2004, Princeton officially implemented a grade-deflation policy intending that As would make up only 35 percent of the grades given out in each department. However, five years later in the 2008-2009 academic year, As still made up 39.7 percent of all grades—and even this relatively high number was considered a major accomplishment. This situation reflects complications that grade deflation encounters at the individual level. Even if a grade-deflation policy were announced, high-achieving Harvard students would expect...
...reality, the idea of As should be welcomed as a positive and easier path. The central issue with the glut of As and A-minuses currently awarded by the college is not that they make students’ GPAs too high, but that they make their GPAs too similar. Grades lose meaning when everyone gets the same ones, whether they are As or Cs. Extending the GPA scale higher to 4.3 would differentiate grades a substantial amount and accomplish much of what grade deflation would...
Additionally—on a more idealistic note—introducing A-pluses in the grading system would properly reward top students for their exemplary work. Right now, both a 98 percent and 93 average still merit the same letter grade, though achieving the former is markedly harder and reflects a much deeper understanding of the course material. It is unfair for students to be penalized for being a few points below the A cutoff and yet not be rewarded for being above this cutoff, and we already tacitly acknowledge this by having the full range...
...Chinese government responds to that pressure in some intriguing ways. It insists that primary-school teachers in math and science have degrees in those subjects. (Less than half of eighth-grade math teachers in the U.S. majored in math.) There is a "master teacher" program nationwide that provides mentoring for younger teachers. Zhang Dianzhou, a professor emeritus of mathematics at East China Normal University in Shanghai who co-chaired a committee charged with redesigning high school mathematics programs across the country, says recent changes have begun to reflect more of a "real-world emphasis." Computer-science courses, for example, have...