Word: tiered
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last spring, in the first move by a top-tier university to address grade inflation, Princeton faculty approved plans for a non-binding 35 percent cap on the number of A-level grades given within departments...
...National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), a pre-collegiate organization that keeps tabs on issues that affect top-tier schools to which many prep schools send their students, grade inflation at the university level is not a primary concern...
...Penney gone trendy? New CEO Myron (Mike) Ullman wants you to think so. He has introduced new lines from Nicole Miller and Chris Madden to the mid-tier department-store, Internet and mail-order business while streamlining sales and launching a new "emotive advertising" campaign. "Mike's a marketing wizard," says analyst Bob Buchanan of A.G. Edwards & Sons. "He tells the customer that just because she doesn't make 100 grand a year doesn't mean she can't look good." Penney's earnings quadrupled in the first quarter over last year, to $172 million. Ullman's clearly doing something...
...aren't always negative. Mystery shoppers also help employers create incentives for exemplary service. Some shoppers see themselves as crusaders, punishing bad behavior and rewarding unsung heroes. Intrawest ski resorts recently handed out $100 bills to workers who scored especially well on a secret-shopper report. And a top-tier hotel rewarded its staff for finding a way to supply an undercover guest with the late-night Pepsi he requested from the Coke-only establishment. "It used to be about catching people doing something wrong," says Mike Bare, MSPA's co-founder. "But more and more, it's validating people...
Initially, I had reservations about the book; Dombey and Son is sort of second-tier Dickens, with especially broad characterizations and implausibly-integrated subplots. Buthaving already worked my way through first-tier DickensI persevered. Before long, I fell happily into the Dickensian rhythm: there were the requisite good lower-orders types and bad lower-orders types, the requisite super-virtuous young woman, the requisite scheming villains who would, I knew, ultimately be vanquished. By the time that the frail, angelic Paul Dombey (so frail and so angelic that his doom was assured from his first appearance in the novel that...