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The closest they came to a fan was an associate provost who admitted that he saw grade inflation as completely out of control and said that for more students at his and similar institutions, the grade-point average range is around 3.4 to 3.8. It seemed that everyone else in the room had been motivated to attend by their sense that the system isn't working: Other academic administrators who said grades had become meaningless.

It was to some extent humiliating for students to realize that they had bought into a system which doesn't work. In which they can be convinced that they've learned something even though they haven't understood it. It was a bit of a shock to them, but that shock is essential. You have to be willing to accept that you don't really understand something if you're going to be a researcher who makes great discoveries of how nature functions and so on.

For A Farewell to Arms, we started with a lottery. Everyone chose a name of a junior and selected a second junior to follow. Besides choosing a quote to reflect on, students also read and commented on two classmates' blogs. The first effect: students talked about blogs during class, their own and their classmates'.