Nobody is going to give a shit about your GPA. Class rank, maybe. But if you go to a school where there are more than a couple of people with better GPAs than yours it’s not a very rigorous program anyway.
As an aside, grading in the US is ridiculous generally. In the UK, it was unusual to get an A, particularly at the postsecondary level. In the US, it seems to be unusual to get anything other than an A.
In (US) law school, most schools adopt a “C curve” which essentially means 40% of the class get a C and only a couple of people can get As, and the number of people crying after first semester grades went out because they’d never had a B or C before was just sad.
I hereby register my detest towards the GPA calculation system of universities.
Mr. Tacos,
I am sorry to inform you that your request for registration was declined by the Detest Committee due to lack of a perfect GPA. And that thing that you did back in 3rd grade. You know what we mean.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jackson, BS, MS, PhD (Bull Shite, More of Same, Piled higher & Deeper)
Detest Committee Chairman
I agree that grade inflation is a problem in the US (and possibly elsewhere).
I did my undergrad degree in Australia, and in most classes far fewer people got an A (or, as we called it, a High Distinction) than in the United States. As someone who now teaches at a university in the US, i do my best to avoid grade inflation, and so far i’ve been relatively (though not completely) successful. In my freshman-level US history classes over the past four or five years, the typical grade breakdown looks something like this:
A/A- 10-15%
B+/B/B- 40-45%
C+/C/C- 25-30%
D+/D/D- about 5%
F about 10%
As you can see, there are a lot of grades in the B and C range. When i graph my grades, it usually comes out as a somewhat compressed normal curve, with the median grade at the B- level, and a lots of B’s and C+'s. The spike in F’s is due to the fact that this includes not only students who actually complete the class and fail, but students who just stop coming to class or who don’t hand in their papers.
I think that, if you turn up, keep coming to class, and do all of the assignments, it is pretty difficult to fail my classes, but it is also difficult to get an A. I believe that a grade in the A range should be reserved for superior work, and not just for jumping through the hoops.
Upper division classes often have a higher percentage of A’s because those classes are usually filled with history majors who like the work and are pretty good at it. The freshman classes, however, are required for all students, so i have nursing and business and biology and kinesiology and computer science majors, many of whom really don’t want to be there.
I get some similar reactions in my freshman classes, because quite a few of my students never received anything less than an A in their high school work. Some of those students deserved their high school A’s, and end up with A’s in my classes too, but others have clearly been passed through the school system without facing any real academic rigor. It’s not helped by the fact that some professors at my university seem to hand out A’s to anyone who shows the ability to fog a mirror.
The problem for a faculty member trying to maintain standards is that your reputation as a rigorous grader spreads, and many students resent you for it. Some, usually the best ones, like being challenged, and i’ve had comments on my course evaluations where students say that they appreciate the fact that i don’t just hand out A’s to everyone. But plenty of them also complain that i’m too “harsh” or that i have “unreasonable expectations.”
I’m lucky that i teach in a department where my chair supports my standards, but the rise of contingent and adjunct faculty on short-term contracts, and without job security, along with the growing emphasis placed by administrators on keeping the student-customers happy, means that plenty of academics feel pressured to go easy on the grading if they want to keep their jobs. It’s a fucked up situation.