To help new students adapt, some colleges are eliminating grades — from npr.org by Jon Marcus
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students and, sometimes, upperclassmen.
Called “un-grading,” the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education — especially for freshmen who are the first in their families to go to college or who weren’t well prepared for college-level work in high school and need more time to master it.
But advocates say the most important reason to adopt un-grading is that students have become so preoccupied with grades, they aren’t actually learning.