Why are Canadian and American letter grade and % grade equivalents different?

In My Humble Opinion
1

When I went to school in Toronto, the way teachers graded us became consistent from middle school onwards. We had two main types of grades - % grades and letter grades (at university, we had % grades and grade point averages, which I never fully understood; letter grades IIRC were rarer if used at all). Percentages were maybe used more, and 50% was considered a passing (but very poor) grade. As I got to understand them, the equivalents were roughly as follows:

0 - 49% = F
50 - 59% = D range
60 - 69% = C range
70 - 79% = B range
80 - 84% = A -
85 - 89% = A
90 - 100% = A+

Some version of this seems to be typical throughout Canada, though I’ve read it doesn’t always correspond to these figures exactly. At some point, though, I found out that, typically, in the United States, the letter grades are assigned to higher percentages, something like this:

0 - 59% = F
60 - 69% = D range
70 - 79% = C range
80 - 89% = B range
90 - 100% = A range

Note this scene from the classic Simpsons episode “Bart Gets an “F”” - Bart narrowly fails his history test with 59% and then narrowly passes when he recalls an obscure historical fact and Mrs. Krabapel takes pity and adds one percentage point. If this were the way I were graded in school, I’d have gotten a lot more “Ds” and “Fs” and a lot fewer “As”.

Is it known why the equivalents are set this way, and why a 50 is (as I have received it) a passing grade in Canada but (to my knowledge) not in the USA? Is it that Canadian schools are more lenient? Or is it that the curriculm tends to be less demanding in the USA, making it easier to pass? I know that American schools tend to vary in quality and standards quite widely depending on where you are; I’ve also heard that American universities basically make you do general courses in your first year, amounting to remedial high-school level courses, before you can specialize in your major; I’ve neither experienced nor heard of this in Canada. I also know that at my high school, getting a 90% was pretty hard, especially in math/science subjects (OTOH, I was at a school that tended to emphasize academics and might have had higher standards than some other schools - I don’t know for sure as I have nothing to compare to locally, though I also recall our principal telling us in an assembly - which maybe she shouldn’t have - that universities regarded our school marks as higher when considering admissions than the same marks of students at other places).

2

I don’t know the answer, but it’s even tighter in some schools. I grew up in Chicago in the 80s to 90s, and in both my Catholic schools, lower than 70% was an F. This seemed to be typical around at least Catholic schools, though I’ve heard of other schools doing it. It was 93-100 is an A, 85-92 is a B, 75-84 is a C, 70-74 is a D, and below that is an F (or U in my grammar school – stood for “unsatisfactory.”)

3

Wasn’t that the standard for passing in the Bing Crosby movie “The Bells of St. Mary’s”, which was also set in a Catholic school?

I went to a normal public school; I don’t know what the grade standards are at Canadian private schools are (incidentally, probably most of our Catholic schools are “separate” publicly-funded schools, where separate schools still exist, but some are private)

I do have one example of hearsay of a stricter grading system in Canada: I recall being told by a man who was old when I was a student, ca. 2000, that when he had been a student at McGill, a reputable montreal university, you needed to get 80% to pass! So this would have been in like the 50s or something. Can’t corroborate it, but that’s what he said.

4

I also grew up going to Catholic schools, where 70=D. On top of that, my high school had a 5-point grading system, so you could actually fail and get a 1.0 gpa as long as you completed the coursework (otherwise you got an “incomplete” and a 0.0).

5

The 10 points per letter grade seems natural even if it wasn’t what I grew up with. It seems like, if you were going to use letter names in the first place, you wouldn’t need to have an extra A+ category (or make A be twice as wide a the other letters, depending on how you look at it). So it makes it look like A+ was tacked on, possibly so that knowing half the material or more was enough to pass.

Alternatively, the original system was 10 points per letter, and there used to be an E, but it was removed to avoid confusion with the system where E means excellent. So they shuffled the letters. Still, though, the fact that they use A+ seems to better fit grade inflation.

That said, I can’t use that logic to guess which came first between the 10 point system and the 8 point system. I could see the 8 point system being made to be more strict, but I could also see the 10 point system being made to simplify the 8 point system.

If anyone actually knows when each system came into widespread use, that would be interesting.

6

I recall our school including some sort of brochure on grading policies and grade distributions. So yes, a B at one place may be considered different from a B elsewhere. But it depends on the college.

The overall scale is arbitrary, as are straight up percentages; I can write a test where the mean is 75, 50, or 35.

I see someone else mentioned the seven point scale. I experienced that at one school.

7

The classes required varies greatly by school and major. General requirements are IME influenced by the traditional western liberal arts education. I.e. everyone with a college education should have college-level study in X Y and Z, including the engineers.

That said, some colleges do have actual remedial classes that typically don’t count toward graduation.

At my school, I was limited to 12 classes (out of 32) in my major (chemistry), which I could only declare going into my third year. Obviously I took some of those before declaring. But as you can see, there was limited specialization at this liberal arts college.

8

In NJ in the 80s that was the standard I experienced (93 for an A, 69 for an F) - but when I moved to PA, the ten-point per grade system was used, so 60% was the cutoff between failing and not.

9

Teachers used to grade on a curve if too many students did badly on a test.

It makes a teacher look bad if the majority of a class makes a low grade. Maybe the class lectures and study material were inadequate. Or the test was badly written.

The curve saved my butt several times. :blush:

There’s little rhyme or reason with grades. 84.9% was a B in some classes and a C in others.

10

Neither side of the scale is an inherently objective measure. I had teachers who graded using letters and only converted them to percentages to calculate averages; the grading scale changed when I was partway through high school but nothing really changed for them.

11

The percentage or grade depends on the composition of the test, so even if they were the same you couldn’t say they represented the same level of competence.

Objective grading standards is a very difficult goal to attain, and if you try to “adjust” by only moving the percentages you are likely to have a substantial portion of teachers adjust their point system.

12

As @ruken said, general education courses are not “remedial.” (There are actual remedial courses at most American universities, but those are required only for students who score low on a standardized test in that subject, and they usually include only a small number of subjects – usually, reading, writing, and math.) The idea behind general education is that everybody should have exposure to a variety of subjects that goes beyond what is typically taught in high school – it’s not supposed to be review from high school. (Admittedly, this idea is not always fulfilled in practice.)

And, while it’s certainly possible to have a test with 10 or 50 or 100 questions where each question is right or wrong, and there may be a few subjects where that is the norm, most university-level assignments don’t look like that. Instead, students spend most of their time doing essays, or speeches, or lab reports, or projects, or something else where the numerical scale is essentially arbitrary, so of course you’d expect it to vary from culture to culture. There’s no such thing as a literary analysis essay that is “85% right” – rather, there’s such a thing as “an essay that does pretty much what the assignment asks, competently but not spectacularly.” The fact that this may be CALLED an 85% in the US and a 75% in Canada does not reflect any meaningful difference between the two systems. (This is actually why I don’t use percent grades at all, just letter grades that I convert to numerical grades on a 4-point, GPA-style scale whenever math is required – I don’t like creating the illusion of more precision than actually exists, and I also don’t want to deal with the whining from students who want to know why their 98% isn’t 100%. But I seem to be the lone holdout on this in my department, and learning management software like Canvas seems to nudge faculty pretty hard toward 0-100 scales.)

13

As others have mentioned, education and grading systems differ across American states and Canadian provinces, and in the case of higher education it’s the particular college or university that decides its policies. Where I’m teaching now (at a university in Quebec), the grading system agreed to by the department for undergraduate courses is the following:
A+: 93% and more
A: 90 to 92%
A-: 87 to 89%
B+: 83 to 86%
B: 80 to 82%
B-: 77 to 79%
C+: 73 to 76%
C: 70 to 72%
C-: 67 to 69%
D+: 63 to 66%
D: 60 to 62%
E: less than 60%

This said, making 60% the minimal passing grade appears to be common in Quebec, while other Canadian provinces (I know it’s the case in Manitoba, and as per the OP I guess in Ontario as well) put the bar at 50%. Why? I don’t think there’s any one reason, and in any case a good teacher will tailor their evaluations to the grading system in place where they’re teaching.

14

Question for the OP: As you understand (or understood) it, what do these percents represent? That is, they’re “100%” or “50%” or “80%” of what?

Because whenever you use percents, it’s important to know what they’re percents of.

For example, if the objective of a class is to impart some body of knowledge, they might be thought of as representing what percentage of that body of knowledge the student can demonstrate that they know. If the objective of the class is to teach mastery of some skill or set of skills, the percent might indicate the degree of mastery.

15

I went to a public high school where 64% was still a failing grade.

16

I think the only possible answer is that they are notional percents, whatever the instructor wants them to be.

I was at three universities in the US, as student, instructor, and (assistant/associate) professor. The grading system in all three was nominally based on 90-100 A, 80-89 B, 75-79 C, 70-74 D, <70 F. But these numbers were essentially arbitrary. Supposedly you gave tests that were graded out of 100 and if you got 3/4 of the answers, that was a 75 and then you took an average of the tests. In fact that was nonsense. What really happened was that you marked all the papers and got rough numerical scores. Even in math it was quite subjective. If you got the right answer you got the full grade for that question, but if you didn’t, we were expected to read the work carefully and figure out where it went wrong. If the student appeared not to understand the principle involved in the question, went completely off the rails, or didn’t even attempt, he got a zero. A simple numerical error might lose one point. Anything in between led to an in between mark, but it was subjective. And if you had 150 papers to mark, you simply could not do it properly. It is easy to follow the thought processes of someone who understands; much harder if they don’t.

So you took the 150 papers or whatever and wrote down the marks and looked at the spread. Almost always, there were a bunch of papers clumped together near the top; they got an A. There were usually a bunch that were clear failures; they got an F. For the rest, you found actual or made up division points and assigned the B, C, D marks.

Then in 1968, I moved to Canada. At McGill, marks were percentages and, IIRC, passing was 50. I was astonished, but I adjusted, doing all the above and then translating them into more-or-less meaningless numbers. Then at some point, in order to compute a GPA, they adopted an A-F system (save there was no E). Some older professors were at a loss how to adapt to it until someone (a colleague of mine in fact) publicized a scale: 50-54 D, 55-64 C, 65-69 B-, 70-74 B, 75-79 B+, 80-84 A-, 85-89 A, 90-100 A+. These were converted to GPA scores using, e.g., 4.3 for A+, 4 for A, 3.7 for A-, 3.3 for B+,… I remember asking why, if the whole purpose of this was to create a GPA, didn’t we just give GPA scores directly. For someone with a score around 84 or 85, maybe you could give a GPA of 3.5 instead of making an arbitrary choice between 3.3 and 3.7. My question never did get an answer.

But my take on the whole question is that the differences between the US and Canada are more in appearance than reality.

17

When I took a “Pre-AP course” in high school (a course intended to prepare me for the Advanced Placement Test (in English, in this case)), the teacher used what she called “holistic scoring” which allowed her to get feedback to us rapidly for each essay we wrote. The method was that she took the five random essays from the pile, and sorted them from worst (1) to best (5). The remaining essays were compared in quality to the reference essays, so she might end up with 20 "5"s or 1 “5” depending on chance - but since we were writing a lot of essays, I suspect the variations to to random selection of the reference essays averaged out.

18

I went to a public high school in Washington State (for grades 10-12 at least) and my chemistry course graded on a curve. If everyone did poorly on a test, then even if you didn’t get many correct answers you still might have a decent grade.

Of course there was one guy in the class who did well on every test and screwed it up for everyone, and we all resented him for it. (No that wasn’t me, chemistry was one of my worst classes and I generally hated it. I did exceptionally well in every other course in high school, just not that one for whatever reason.)

19

I went to a good Montreal (English) university. At that time, an A was 85-100 with a maximum GPA of 4.0 and most courses were marked on a curve (so that the average was a B-, C+ or C). Roughly 2-3% of students received an A in many courses. They really didn’t give them away.

But many Canadian universities offered an A+. There are plenty of different scales in use in Canada and many schools have a maximum GPA of 4.3 or 5.

In English and Scottish universities, an A is often a mark above 70%. These schools often set extremely hard exams marked pedantically - and getting high marks may be quite difficult.

20

None of us know what they did to determine the exact grades, but “grading on a curve” is what @Hari_Seldon described. An outlier like that would just be an obvious candidate for an A+ and would not affect the rest of the marks.

The more likely explanation for why “everyone” received mediocre marks is that they did mediocre work. Easier for them to digest if they try to shift the blame by imagining their final grades would have been higher if not for that one nerd.