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Show Two ahead, one back person's intellectual achievement or knowledge. In short, this latest policy goes against the whole trend of discarding dis-carding letter grades, the trend symbolized by CRNC, "goal- Progress comes a little bit at a time, we are told two steps foreward and one step back. The latest step back is a revision revis-ion in the University's grading practices allowing any college to add pluses and minuses to the previously-existing ABCDE system. sys-tem. Passed by the University Senate last spring, this increases the number of grades from five to eleven (not counting CRNC, I, W, and X). One of the major flaws in the old grading system was that it tried to arbitrarily rank students into five levels of achievement, forcing students to grub for that last point that would make a C into a B. Now we'll grub for that last quarter-point that will make a C into a C-l. Before, the grading system announced that a given student had achieved between 80 and 89 percent of "ideal" in the subject; now we nitpick into "between "be-tween 80 and 82.5" percent. Certainly students recognize the fundamental line represented by grades. They symbolize a person's per-son's ability to figure out how a certain professor grades, rather than an honest evaluation of a achievement contracts," and other promising innovations. Providing an opportunity for intellectual advancement and acquisition of des.red skills are opposed to the basic promise of competitive grades The University should not, at this time, encourage a re-gress,on re-gress,on back towards competitive competi-tive ranking. M |