But its poll also found that most people thought grades and teacher evaluations were better guides to promotion than standardized tests.
Over the same period an 18-percentage point gap opened up between pass rates in A-levels and the International Baccalaureate.Alan Smithers, an educationalist at Buckingham University, thinks grades inflate when examiners check scripts that lie on boundaries between grades.
I don't think grades played any part in the politics of the school, which may be why I let mine sink to D-minus even in French and English, usually my best subjects.
They make us feel knowledgeable about politics instead of rightfully ashamed that someone thinks grade-school mnemonics should be enough to construct an economic plan for 300 million people living in differing degrees of prosperity.
Zeinab, also in grade seven, thought that grade one students were too immature to learn the proper names for their body parts.
"I remember feeling so happy when my mom told me, because I always thought the grade below mine was special," he said.
John Lavine, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism, said the suggestion that students might have thought their grades were linked to what witnesses said was "astonishing".
Thus, cultural expectations of gender roles could be the reason that minority students, in Fig. 6, thought that grades were more important to their male peers than to them.
Does anyone think that grade inflation (one study found high school grades increasing by about a quarter-point on the scale from 0 to 4 between 1991 and 2003) is all about how much more accomplished students are?
Think Norma Desmond, grade B sitcom style, a decade younger, and conspicuously less grand.
