WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) -- McGraw-Hill Cos. has replaced the top executive at Standard & Poor's Corp. as criticism of the company's financial-information division mounts for its role in the unfolding subprime-mortgage crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

    Kathleen Corbet, S&P's president, will be succeeded by Deven Sharma, 51 years old, a senior McGraw-Hill executive who has been at S&P since late last year, according to the report.

    S&P's bond-rating arm and several other rating services have downgraded hundreds of mortgage-backed securities tied to subprime loans in recent months.

    Critics charge S&P and others were too optimistic about the market for too long. Ratings firms say they did the best they could with the information available at the time. The company also compiles stock indexes such as the S&P's Composite Index of 500 stocks, commonly known as the S&P 500.