February 3, 1983

The Reagan Administration today suspended a grading standard that provides consumers with information for comparing the durability of tires. The Administration and most major manufacturers of replacement tires, a $6 billion industry in 1982, contend that the tread-wear grading system is unscientific and that consumers may be misled by it. The system covers 93 brands of automobile tires in 2,500 sizes and styles. Raymond A. Peck, Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said today: ''We just cannot reliably tell whether a higher-graded tire will wear better than a lower-graded tire. The standard is not only failing in its primary purpose of informing consumers, it is misleading some of them.''

''They were going for milk and honey and they are coming back weeping tears.'' - The Rev. Anastasius Dzodofe of Ghana, commenting on his expelled countrymen. (A13:6.)

For the stage-struck in the suburbs, this is the hour of angst. Auditions for the spring season are at hand, and they're enough to make make even the most seasoned amateur thespian shudder. ''I was terrible,'' said Robert Bromberg, a traveling salesman from Monsey, N.Y. ''I was driving around all day in my car rehearsing my song. But at the audition I couldn't modulate my voice. I went to pieces completely. I went home with my head between my legs.''

''ISN'T it strange to be doing this in the middle of New York?'' Paula Perlis was saying. ''I mean downtown, in a major city?'' Mrs. Perlis, a food consultant, and four of her friends were sitting around a quilting frame, stitching a colorful patchwork quilt together. It is something they do every Wednesday night in the kitchen of Laura Priko, an expert quilter who lives on Vandam Street in Lower Manhattan. The women, most of whom live in nearby brownstones, are among the growing number who are holding regular quilting bees throughout the metropolitan area. While the Vandam Street group is unnamed, most of the others have names: the Ladies of the Evening Quilt Club in Ridgefield, Conn.; the City Quilters in Brooklyn; the Good Wives in Darien, Conn.; the Empire Quilt Club in Brooklyn and Manhattan; the Hat City Quilters in Danbury, Conn., and the Huntington Quilters Society on Long Island.

Ghanaian military and civilian officials trying to organize the often-chaotic repatriation of refugees from Nigeria said today that the number of Ghanaian citizens expelled might be as high as two million, possibly more. The officials are trying to feed and cure and find transportation for the tens of thousands of refugees passing each day through an improvised camp at this town a few miles across the border from Lome, the capital of Togo. So far, the officials estimate that more than half a million refugees have been through the camp in the last five days. Perhaps 25,000 more passed through today, in cattle trucks, vans, taxis and on foot, and 15,000 more milled around the camp, sporadically creating near-riots, running, shoving and grappling with one another and with Ghanaian soldiers each time a new supply of bread or water arrived.