Nonletter

Manhattanville College in Purchase, N. Y., has joined a small but growing [movement] back to the practice of awarding letter grades after a year's experiment with a nonletter system that was seen as a way of reducing the competitiveness and authoritarian quality of [letter] grading.

The grading policy now specifies that all students enrolled before the spring 1982 semester in classes of less than 40 students will receive written evaluations, with either a nonletter grade (honors, pass or no credit) or a letter grade on their transcripts. Under the old system, the no-credit notation did not appear on the transcript.

While economists generally say that a W remains entirely possible, they aren’t willing to make it their most-likely forecast because it hinges on two total unknowns: whether there is another spike in infections, and whether states will shut down again if that happens. Analysts who venture a guess increasingly favor a nonletter shape as their base-case: the checkmark.