Standing in line to board the jet to Sweden yesterday, I read over a woman's shoulder in Times Higher Education that ERIH, the European Reference Index for the Humanities, is scrapping its A-B-C-nil grading system (previously discussed here in October). It's come under heavy fire because of the fundamental differences between the natural sciences and the humanities. There is no such thing as independent Swedish chemistry or medicine, but there's any number of fields of research in the humanities that are almost entirely confined to single countries. As Horace Engdahl pointed out last year, Sweden has the best Gunnar Ekelöf scholars in the world. Because nobody else cares much about our poets.
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What sort of grading system will they be using instead? Will it be pass/fail? That's the system used on one campus of the University of California (Santa Cruz). I used to think that would be an improvement, but my brother, who went there, found it had its own problems.