Word: minuses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Grades have risen almost every year since the beginning of the 20th century. But this epidemic has gained more attention as grade inflation intensified during the 1990s to the point that Cs have become virtually nonexistent. Today, only 6 percent of grades are below a B-minus, while almost 50 percent are As or A-minuses...
...Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. ’53, on a “collapse of critical judgment” in evaluating undergraduate coursework. Harvard’s standards have atrophied to the point where mediocre work receives a B, and merely solid work receives an A-minus...
...that a student’s work was mediocre, unoriginal or contained significant omissions but gives the student a B—which is supposed to indicate good work—the student receives conflicting signals and is less likely to take the critical comments seriously. But a C-minus on a poorly completed assignment, if accompanied by constructive criticism, is both fair and would motivate the student to do better work in the future...
...standard deviation for an exam in an English class, the value would likely hover around one—far too small to make meaningful comparisons. It has become all too common for the goof-off and the hard-working genius to be separated by a single plus or minus on their transcript. When almost half of grades given out at the College are A or A-minus, distinguishing oneself in the classroom is not a matter of being better than everyone else, but of being perfect...
Summers has the right idea because getting rid of grade inflation is the only way to kill the cult of the “sigma” and refocus students from being perfect to actually learning. When the only acceptable grades in popular science courses are A and A-minus, top students are forced to compete brutally for those scores. If the B were restored to its position as an honorable grade, it would take much of the pressure off of those students to “be perfect,” as they have been for their entire careers...