If I had more faith in the decision-making abilities of all teachers, I would say toss out letter grades and percentages altogether. In high school students beg the teacher to give them certain grades so they can get into a certain college. The teacher gives them the grade, hands them off to the college, and never sees or thinks about them again. Then in college, the process repeats. I was absolutely amazed at the lack of intelligence in my first college course. We had to pass around our papers and have others read them. Every paper came to me with crappy spelling, run-on sentences (and paragraphs), and absolutely no development as a paper. It makes me feel like my degrees aren't worth much. There's so much urgency in the world as a whole that we don't have time to teach life lessons. Someone needs a certain grade to get into the College of Education, so they beg the prof for that grade even though it's not deserved. They HAVE to get in NOW. Well, what about next year? Audit the class, work harder, and try again later. Life isn't over if you don't get exactly what you want when you want it. Medical research allows life expectancies to get longer while we try to squeeze more and more into them. Students just need to relax a little and realize that the world isn't ending tomorrow. We make mistakes and we pay for them, but that doesn't mean that we should wallow in them. Sometimes I don't change things when I should have, but that's not an excuse to not change it now.