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  3. Lately, presidents of some American universities have added inflation to their worry list. They are not concerned about inflatio

Lately, presidents of some American universities have added inflation to their worry list. They are not concerned about inflatio

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问题     Lately, presidents of some American universities have added inflation to their worry list. They are not concerned about inflation of prices, but of academic grades. Larry Summers, president of Harvard, recently caused a storm when he told one of the university’s professors he didn’t like grade inflation.
   Insiders say that nearly half the grades Harvard awards have lately been A or A-minus-a lot more than in the 1980s. Is this trend a bad thing, in fact? And is this grade inflation really "inflation" ?
   To take the second question first, the answer is No, not strictly speaking. "Inflation" in grades ought to mean that work of a given standard would be awarded an ever higher grade, year by year. The highest permissible grade would therefore have to keep rising in a ceaseless procession of non-improvement. Because in reality the top grade is fixed, the process is not so much grade inflation as grade compression. This is worse: a distortion in relative prices is more confusing than a uniform upward, drift. Grade compression squeezes information out of the system.
   But is grade inflation necessarily a bad thing? The answer depends on who you are. When students leave Harvard, they carry grades as a sort of currency: a pocketful of intellectual capital, to bid for jobs or places in graduate schools against graduates from other universities with other currencies. These positions go to those who can put the most academic cash on the table. Employers and graduate schools must decide on the exchange rate, as it were, between a Harvard C student and an A student from a less distinguished place.
   Again, overall grade inflation--the uniform devaluation of the students’ capital would be relatively easy to cope with, working in principle neither to the advantage or disadvantage of Harvard graduates. Recruiters, in a position to see the market for graduates as a whole, would simply adjust their exchange rate. Compression, however, has distributional consequences. The best Harvard students see their grades devalued relative to those of second-rate Harvard students. That is bad with respect to encouraging students to work harder.
The text talks about the recent storm concerning grade inflation in American universities by focusing on ______.
选项 A、its causes
B、its features
C、its impacts
D、its purposes
答案C
解析 推理题。分析全文的结构可知，前两段提出了学分通胀的问题，第三段的第二句和第三句简要说明了学分通胀的原因，即：学分“通胀”应该意味着同一水准的成绩获得的学分逐年增高。因此，在没有改善、提高的情况下，允许学生获得的最高学分在不断上升。然而在现实中，最高学分是固定的，因此这个过程不是学分增值而是学分贬值。紧接着，该文又分析了学分通胀所产生的影响；相对价格的扭曲比统一上浮更加令人困惑。学分贬值让学生学到的知识越来越少，从而令整个教育系统的知识量减少，甚至匮乏。文章的第四段和第五段也是对学分通胀所产生的影响的分析，包括对学生就业和继续学习的影响，故选c。
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