I pulled up the website for my local public school system. Their grading is as follows:
A - 93 - 100
B - 85 - 92
C - 75 - 84
D - 70 - 74
F - 0 - 69
It’s interesting to me that there’s a 7-point spread for A’s and B’s, C have a 10-point spread and D’s have a 4-point spread, which presumably gives students a higher GPA than if it was a straight 7-point spread for each letter grade.
StG
I’m surprised schools currently give an F for a 69. That’s harsh.
I’d heard schools graded easier today compared to my generation. That’s not the case with that school.
Everybody in Canada gets an ‘Eh’?
This joke doesn’t work in print.
These aren’t really “American” standards. The scales are determined on a school-by-school basis or even by individual teachers.
I recall when I started 7th grade in 1981 my school was using the tougher 93 percent A standard. But by the next year, we had switched to the 90-80-70-60 scale.
Another data point:
Public school, Belle Fourche, South Dakota, 90s.
70% was “minimum passing”, a D.
My kids’ school is far more lenient, more like the 50-100 range, which just seems BIZARRE to me… Learning only half of your algebra should not be a passing grade…
I think that joke works fine @Gatopescado. You just have to think aboot it.
Actually now that I think about it that switchover happened earlier like in 5th or 6th grade.
Yeah, the idea of “breaking the curve” or “ruining the curve” was alive and rampant at my high school, but every teacher seemed to “curve” in a different way. A “curve” was more shorthand/a colloquialism for a way of rebalancing grades/adjusting scores than using a normal distribution or whatnot to assign X% of grades to As and Fs, Y% of grades to Bs and Ds, and Z% of grades to C.
None of my teachers in high school or college used a strict curve that was centered on a C. Honestly, I have no idea what they all did. I know one teacher would simply take the highest score, and then use that as 100% and then regrade all the other tests based on that (in the simplest form, simply by adding percentage points to the other grades based on the difference between the highest scorer and 100%). In that case, one person can “break the curve.”
Another teacher – God knows what he did, but in freshman year biology class, I ended up with scores like 140% on some tests. In those test, there was no fear of me breaking the curve, as I simply was graded with a score way above 100% if I did that much better than the rest of the class.
In college, it also varied from subject to subject, but it seemed like the center was generally around a B, but the distribution was skewed such that there were more As & Bs than the rest of the grades.
Yeah my physics teacher gave notoriously difficult exams. Once the highest grade was less than 50 percent.
He would plot the results on a graph and then A, B, C, etc. to clumps of results.
Once my friend scored above 70 when no one else scored above 50, so he got the sole A. That was an actual instance of breaking the curve.
One of my electronics professors had notoriously tough examples. I saw the look on one student’s face when he got a 15% (I think I got a 50%). The final exam was ridiculous, too - as the test was passed back through the auditorium, you could hear the “well, we’re screwed” laughter moving back with it (and one person’s whistling of “If I only had a brain”)
At one Engineering school where I was involved, anything below 48% was arbitrary: it meant you had failed. 50% meant you had passed. 48% or 49% meant you had sort-of failed: You could maybe make it up or find an excuse. That meant that (1) markers put some thought into if you were a 47 or a 48, and (2) the administration wasn’t going to second guess the markers: if you were 47, you didn’t need “just 3 more marks”.
This is almost exactly my memory of what our grade ranges were in high school. I graduated in 1969.
I had a prof kinda like that in uni for my Chaucer class. I worked my butt off on a paper and was really disappointed in getting a B-. Turns out it was the highest grade in the class. This guy did not grade on a curve.
40 years ago in Pakistan, a 70 on the school leaving exam was an A. People who averaged 90+ would be on a television talk show. And there was only one television talk show. My average was 78. It was in the top 1%. The only subject in which anyone got 100 was math.
My daughter in high school (USA) is averaging 97 and is not even in the top 5% of her class. Several students are averaging over 100. This is a very competitive school, many students go to Ivies/Stanford/MIT each year. But still I find the grade inflation ridiculous.
Number grades are meaningless.
If you apply to university or professional schools, they tend to be aware of grade inflation and often do adjust for it.
I went to high school in both Montreal and Los Angeles. (I moved in the middle of 10th grade). So I have experience with both systems.
From what I recall, the grades in Montreal were the percentages. There were no letter grades at all except perhaps notionally.
On the other hand in LA the only grades were letter grades. There were no percentage grades for the class as a whole, only perhaps for individual assignments or tests.
So I really can’t compare the two in a direct way.
To answer the question about comparing the difficulty of curriculum in the two places: The average student in the Montreal high school was exposed to harder work than in LA. But if you were motivated, you could do just as well. The LA school was much bigger, so it had many more advanced electives, but they were not required for graduation.
Not necessarily. Because as others have explained, the percentages have some arbitrariness to them.
Yes, that’s how it worked in my schools and universities. The percentage was just son individual assignments, exams, quizzes, papers, etc., for the individual instructor/teacher/professor to use for determining the final letter grade, which was the only thing reported at the end of the term.
And the letter grades were then converted to a four-point scale (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, F=0) which were the basis for calculating grade point average (G.P.A.).
My law school used a 12-point scale, which is another pain in the butt. A=12, A-minus=11, B-plus=10, B=9, etc. (there was no A-plus)
We didn’t use the letter grades, but yep- the uni I just left 39% or under as a fail, 40-49% as the lowest grade, then 50-59%, 60-69% and 70+ was the highest grade.
The final grade for the degree is from some complicated weighting of different modules in different years, and is just in the categories: fail, 3rd class, 2.2, 2.1 and 1st from lowest to highest.
100% is virtually unheard of- a guy in my class managed it for one component of one module in the first year, and the lecturer said he’d never given a 100% score before on that level course, and got all excited.
Yeah, here in Chicago, I’m not aware of anyone getting a percentage as a final grade. We got percentages on many exams (especially ones that obviously lend themselves to percentages, like multiple choice tests, but more subjective ones like essays may get only a letter grade, depending on the teacher) but not on any of our report cards
As said above, in high school, these would be converted to grade points for purposes of grade point averages (GPA) and class ranking (we didn’t rank in grammar school), but you couldn’t really compare GPAs from school to school because there are different systems. Some use a 5 point (as mentioned before, although the one I’m familiar with has a 0 for an F, so it’s A=5 - B=4 - C=3 - D=2 - F=0), the more common one, in my experience, is the four-point scale. Our high school had a four-point scale for regular classes, but if you took honors or AP classes, you’d get a 1.2 multiplier. (A=4.8, B=3.6, C=2.4, D=1.2, F=0). And our maximum GPA wasn’t 4.8, because we all had to take gym and swimming the first two years, and those were 4.0 max classes. So I think our maximum GPA at the time was 4.77 if you took a full load of classes. (Now looking at my high school’s hand book, it’s gotten way more crazy with different scales for regular, honors, and AP classes, and you do get an extra 0.2 GPA points if you get an A+ – such a distinction did not exist in my school thirty years ago. An A was worth every bit as much as an A+.)