Word: malan
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...class—will be able to receive letter grades per General Education policy. CS50 will continue to be offered with letter-graded status for departments that expect the course as a letter-graded concentration requirement or for students who prefer to receive a letter grade, according to Malan...
...Malan, who first started teaching CS50 in the fall of 2007, said that he had long considered eliminating letter grades to encourage more students without previous programming experience to take the course...
Given the course’s reputation for time-consuming problem sets, Malan said he often worries that interested students may shy away from taking the course, though 72 percent of students who took CS50 last semester said they had no programming experience...
...Some students, myself once included, absolutely hesitate to turn the page to some chapter unfamiliar to them out of fear of ‘failure’ or some dark mark on their transcript,” Malan wrote in an e-mail. “With this change to sat/unsat, CS50 hopes to free students to explore a world beyond their own comfort zone...
Citing the success of similar grading systems at Harvard Law School and at MIT—where freshmen do not receive letter grades their first semester—Malan said that CS50 students would be able to focus more on the material rather than the grade itself...