Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1427

The real world is worse; not only are you allowed to deliver poor-quality work late, they pay you extra to fix your own problems.

That's a new one to me, but it makes sense given other trends.

One middle school (grades 6-8) near mine decided it was bad for students' self-esteem if they failed, so they set their grading computer to automatically change any failing grade to a 70 (minimum to pbutt).

It gets better... When those kids hit high school, their grades were remarkably bad -- something like over half of them failing every clbutt. Since the school was in danger of losing accreditation, they simply put all the failing kids in "special ed", which exempted them from all testing and grade standards as well as got the school more revenue from the state.

What amazes me is that it was even needed. My mother taught at that high school, and her clbutt was structured so if you showed up every day and just copied her notes off the board, you would pbutt the clbutt. Even so, dozens of kids would drop out every year and her failure rate averaged 40%; if you add in kids that lost credit due to low attendance, it was probably near 70%. They just didn't care, and neither did their parents.

I thought it'd been like that since the 50s; isn't that when "nerd" was coined? I doubt it's much worse today than it was then.

I did notice in HS that there was much less animosity towards achievers than in lower grades; even the dumbest football players started to realize their career options were limited and that it was too late to fix things. The "cool" clique was nearly all Honors students and our head cheerleader was salutatorian. Being a nerd still wasn't cool, but the term was only applied to social rejects, not high-achievers with good social skills.

S