It has never, in fact, worked. The delicious irony is that nothing is so impractical as practicality in higher education. Fears propel students to pursue it, but the result, as you may see in ten or twenty years, will be a kind of ghastly slapstick, where Larry, Moe, and Curly, frantically occupied with the pursuit of some practical end, accomplish little but their own agony in their fits of misdirected effort. Blessed be those pragmatists for whom some gratuitous Groucho comes to outjest them then in their heart-struck injuries. But in the meantime, for those in pursuit of a liberal education, relevance of a different sort, thankfully, is the purchase and pride of it.
Contemporary students fear bad grades, apparently having forgotten what a grade signifies.
Designed only to measure the progress and extent of one's education, grades are a coda or footnote to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, but the coda has swamped the symphony, the footnote has obliterated the text. In many students' priorities, the measure has supplanted or usurped in value that which is measured. This is understandable, I admit. Whenever we attempt to measure things, a subtle shift occurs in our imagination, allowing the black hole of measurement to absorb more and more of our attention and effort. But do not misunderstand.