Cathy N. Davidson

The school board in Mount Olive, N.J., will get rid of the D grade starting this fall, in an effort to raise the standards for graduation. From now on, any student whose average grade falls below a 70 will simply fail. How did we end up with an A-B-C-D-F grading system, anyway? Did schools ever…

Cathy Davidson is a professor of English and interdisciplinary studies at Duke University, and she is a co-founder of HASTAC (pronounced “haystack”), a website that links humanities, art, science and technology. You can find her Cat in the Stack blog posts at www.hastac.org. She tweets at @CatInStack. Questions and answers have been edited. read more…

When Duke University’s Cathy Davidson announced her grading plan for a seminar she would be offering this semester, she attracted attention nationwide. Some professors cheered, others tut-tutted, and others asked “Can she do that?” read more >>

Nationwide effort includes over $260 million in public-private investments 
to move American students to the top of the pack
in science and math achievement over the next decade. read more >>

Shortly after last week’s column appeared, I headed out to Iowa City to attend — and, as the occasion required, to pontificate at — a gathering called Platforms for Public Scholars. Sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, it drew somewhere between 100 and 150 participants over three days.