D not a passing grade

Some schools have decided that a D is no longer a passing grade. Apparently, the schools are sick of students just barely scraping by and wanted to raise the standards. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can’t see it making a whole lot of difference. On the other hand at Queen’s they don’t even bother giving us D’s. The reality is, you’re taking an arbitrary system of judgment along a scale and shifting that scale in one direction. So, all you’ve done is change the arbitrary values that are being awarded. You’re still going to have students that are only doing enough to get by, you’ve just changed how your school is perceived against other arbitrary numerical scales. It makes those schools look worse, but not many schools have a tendency of showing off their mediocre students anyway.