[shinjitsu]

>One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common >with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would >expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest

the problem with this, in the US at least, is that the STEM people might do this, but then the social science and humanities departments were using the other grading scheme. It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.

(which again brings us back to the thread topic I guess, when graduating with latin honors was hard it was a good way to indicate likely entry into the elite. Now that many can achieve latin honors they are no longer good for entry into the elite, but people still expect them to be.

[908B64B197]

> It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.

Grade inflation in a nutshell.