My father’s 1930’s report cards - as well as a percentage mark for each course, it also showed his ranking within the class for each course. This must have been a hassle for teachers to do - in those pre-computer days.
Yep. As said above, I’ve never seen a percentage on a transcript. Just letter grades.
Complicated weighting? This sounds exactly how grade point average is calculated in the United States. Each course/class (module) is assigned a certain number of credit-hours. So a light elective course might be 2 credit hours. A twice a week class might be 3, a three times a week class might be 4, and a very demanding classs with a practical component might be 5. Most classes are 3 or 4. A full time Student takes 12-15 credit hours each quarter/semester/term.
So you add up all your grades on a four point (or whatever) scale and divide it by the total credit-hours and that’s your GPA.
Over here you normally sign up to a programme of study right from the start; while there may be a few options, you’re basically following a planned series of classes, all related to the topic with planned progression, so you take courses of one difficulty level in one year, no mixing things up.
Each class is a given number of credits, but a 40 credit class in year 1 wouldn’t count the same as a 40 credit class in year 3. All the classes taken in a year are averaged- weighted by number of credits- and the year averages are then weighted for the overall grade for the degree. I think my course was calculated so only 10% of the final grade came from the first year modules, 30% from the second year and 60% from the final year, but I’m not actually sure, it wasn’t very transparent at all. I also remember hearing that that the lowest scoring module in the first year- so long as it was a pass- was also discounted from the average. They had a lot of students who had been out of education for a while, so I believe they had this to allow people to take a little longer to get up to speed, as it were.
Mine got more confusing as I did it as a foundation degree plus top-up year, this basically gave me a qualification after the second year, topped up to a full degree. I was talked into it as a more flexible option; the year weighting was different if it was done that way, that much I know, but I never got a straight answer as to how it was different, just that it was.
The credits also don’t necessarily have anything to do with how many hours of teaching are involved, instead mapping more closely to how the modules were assessed. In fact, the single largest component was the final year project -20% of the overall grade IIRC- which had no teaching at all, and was left entirely up to the students to decide how much time to dedicate to it.
Here, regardless of their specialty (“major”), all university students are required to have a broad-based education. So liberal arts students must have X credits in math and science and STEM students must have X credits in language arts, communication, history, etc. And then a certain number of credits are “elective” meaning “I’m taking this just inexperience something new,” and it can be anything that’s the university offers.
Here, they would just assign the higher-value courses more credit-hours. Credit-hours are only roughly equivalent to weekly classroom time. It’s not strictly one-to-one.
Here, such a paper or project might appear in your transcript like an ordinary course and be assigned the number of credit-hours that would reflect its importance to your degree.
For example in my last year of law school I participated in a law clinic, and it was assigned 12 credit-hours, roughly equivalent to theee or four regular courses.
From K through 12 I think letter grades were more-or-less synonymous with percentages, with A being 100%-90%, B being 80%-89%, and so on. There were variations and teachers seemed to have considerable leeway in how exactly this was applied. I attended school in California and Oregon in the 90s and early 00s.
As an engineering student the course syllabi were very detailed in their description of what letter grade corresponded to what percentage, and the particular weighting of each course component. An A was almost always 100%-93%, an A- was 92.99%-90%, and so on. A-plusses were never given. Homework was often about 20% of the course grade, and the final exam often about 30%. In this fashion, it was often possible to determine exactly what score you needed to earn on some test in order to obtain a particular letter grade.
I don’t think any of my university coursework was graded on a curve. Insofar as extra credit existed, it was at the instructor’s discretion and might add a maximum of 3% onto your course grade (usually enough to shift a D+ to a C-, for example). Instructors usually weighed the final enough that it was impossible to skip it entirely and still pass the class, even if you aced everything up to that point.
In terms of GPA, base letter grades were A = 4.0, B = 3.0, C = 2.0, and D = 1.0. Plusses or minuses added or subtracted 0.3 from the base amount, respectively (e.g. A- = 3.7).
Whether pluses and minuses on grades are possible, and what if any effect they have on GPA, is something that varies from institution to institution. I have been at more than one institution that changed, or considered changing, their policy while I was there.
Absolutely. The community college I attended offered A-plusses for example, but plusses and minuses did not affect GPA.