Grading effort :: Inside Higher Ed

Benedict is only the fourth college in the AAUP’s history that has been deemed worthy of special condemnation after already being on the censure list, where the college has been since 1994 because of its policies on faculty appointments. The more recent controversy involves Benedict’s policy of grading freshmen and sophomores as much on their effort as on their actual accomplishments. Professors complained that the policy forced them to pass students whose achievement did not come close to demonstrating basic concepts of their courses.

The AAUP found that Benedict’s president dismissed professors and demoted department chairs who disagreed with the grading policy, which was adopted without faculty input.

Meanwhile, we have this from The Economist, as quoted by Mahalanobis:

The American educational establishment's weakness for airy-fairy notions about the evils of standards and competition is particularly damaging to poor children who have few educational resources of their own to fall back on. One poll of 900 professors of education, for example, found that 64% of them thought that schools should avoid competition.