Kyla: University of Michigan was LSA, early to mid 80s. It wouldn’t shock me that it had changed–I’m pretty sure other schools had other scales. One indelible memory of mine (involving the second semester of Physical Chemistry, so I’m not too ashamed) was learning that D+ was the lowest grade that actually counted as passing.
We had those during my middle and high school years (1969 - 75), but they were used in addition to letter grades. You’d get a letter grade for your mastery of the material, etc., and then two E/S/U grades, one for cooperation and one for effort. But the only grade that truly mattered was the letter grade. They had the much same thing in my father’s day, who also attended L.A. public schools from 1932 - 42.
I’d be interested in knowing when the A - F system came to be. I’m fairly sure that numeric grades, out of 100, were more common in the 19th century, as shown in this 1904 report card.
At my alma mater, for an undergrad, a grade of D, was “unacceptable, passing”, while an F was “unacceptable, failing”. A C was “acceptable, passing”. That is, a D was quite bad but you technically got credit for the course. You could get away with a small number of credit hours of “unacceptable, passing” grades in order to qualify for a degree, but many courses required a minimum of a C for a class to count as a prerequisite, and in real life, a C was pretty bad.
When I took O-Levels in England (I do not mean Britain; in Scotland they had an entirely different exam system) they used an A to H scale. Out maths teacher told us that F, G and H stood for Fail, Ghastly, and Horrible.
Also, British universities grade bachelor’s degrees (or used to in my day) as:
First
Upper Second (AKA Two-one)
Lower Second (AKA Two-two)
Third
Pass
Fail
The difference between a two-one and two-two was a big deal. (Firsts were extremely rare.)
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I grew up in Michigan and was in school from 1984-1996. E was failure, not F.
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In 2008, Michigan dropped “D” as a passing grade. Only A-C counts as passing, and C must equal 70% minimum.
So, Michigan goes, A, B, C, E.
We always were indoctrinated that “C” was average, even for courses where the teacher didn’t grade using a bell curve. Personally, I always thought that C’s were pretty bad, too, especially in that my final school system was designed so that every idiot could graduate.
Did anyone besides me have an Strong,Normal,** U**nsatisfactory grade system in elementry school?
I like Hari Seldon’s point above. You skip the E because there is no grade with a value of 1 when computing GPA.
All of my education (grade school/university) was in a Canadian province where all of my grades were out of 100. As a result, I’ve never been graded a letter and never really understood why it was popular.
Doesn’t it suck to get a 89/100 and get a B, whereas the guy who got a 90/100 gets an A? It seems more ‘fair’ to express one’s score out of 100 than out of 5 letters (or 12 if one counts the ±’s). Shouldn’t it differentiate on your report card whether you get a 59% (F) or a 2% (F).
Again, I have never been graded that way so maybe I’m just missing something. But I don’t understand why you’d want to take an exam with a percentage, then convert it to a letter, then convert it back to a percentage for your GPA scoring. Why induce all that rounding error?
That’s actually part of the point, methinks. It may not have originally been so, but it serves to distinguish over time the consistently good students from the average, while covering for the inevitable differences of speciality, professors, and year-to-year grind. The thing about percfentages is that they sound far more accurate than they really are. Grading is not a science: it lacks both accuracy and precision. Furthermore, it doesn’t really tell you much about relative position, whereas letter grades in the long run usually do.
But isn’t “A” generally understood to mean 90-100%, B 80-89%, and so on? At least, that’s how it was for me, all through school and college. That being the case, aren’t they more or less equivalent?
Some profs do it that way. Others may give an A to the top X% of students, regardless of their actual scores. (These are usually the math and engineering types who give exams with questions so hard that nobody is expected to do better than, say, 60%. I never really saw the point of this; I think these profs just like to fuck with their students’ heads.)
Maybe because that’s the U of F, and they don’t want to taint the letter F.
If I may qualify, these marks are typically highly scaled, such that around 10%-20% of the year (depending on the university) will get a mark of a credit or above, and around 1% of the year would be given an HD. I went to a university that had a number of exchange agreements with US colleges, and we probably averaged at least one Septic in each tutorial group.
Inevitably, they would see that they only needed a 50 to pass the course, explain that it would be easy because they needed a 70 to pass back at home, so they’d take most of the course off.
When they got their course results back and they were hovering around the mid-30s, they had it explained to them that 50 was a mark assigned to someone who was just good enough to pass rather than someone who got half of the answers right.
We sent home a lot of angry Americans with fails on their records.
I looked at doing an exchange year in the US, but was warned that equivalence would only be given by the university if I achieved marks in the mid-80s or higher at the American school. In one case they required a 92 to give equivalence to a pass.
As I needed to maintain a Credit average, I decided to stay at home.
I’d also point out that you couldn’t rely on getting a PC with anything less than a 50. I knew someone who was given a 49 in an Accounting 1A course and was offered a PT (a terminating pass - the pass would be conceded, but you couldn’t then use that course as a prerequisite for other courses). He had to take the F and redo it as the course was core to his degree.
You got an E for misspelling curiosity. 
New College of Florida (a really good public liberal arts school mysteriously located in the otherwise unusually stupid town of Sarasota) doesn’t give grades at all.