I get grade reports for my children in middle school and high school. These reports always show an overall percent grade which is then mapped to a letter grade based on a grading scale. Student: Gas, Little
Student’s Grade: 90.22% (A-)
But at some point, someone needs to figure out a GPA and then you have to assign numbers back to the letter grade (also shown in above link) to calculate an average.
Why not just a numeric scale of 0-100 and be done with it?
I know, this is steeped in tradition and all that, but it is such a simple idea I have to believe that it’s been seriously discussed someplace.
English papers, for instance, don’t get percentage scores. Sure, they’re converted into some number for averaging purposes, but they’re still where the tradition comes from. I doubt you’ll ever see a poem graded with an 82%, so you’re probably stuck with the current system.
Obvious differences between the systems is that the GPA system is biased differently compared with the 0-100 system. For example, a 50% maps to a 0.0 GPA, but a 50% grade plus a 100% grade averages to a 75%, which maps to something in the 2.x range. If your class doesn’t allow C+ or B- grades, it maps down to a 2.0 which you would also get for a flat 70%.
Generally, anything between 90% and 100% maps to a 4.0. This actually mattered to me in a class where I ended up really only caring that I hit a final grade of at least 90%, since anything above that was irrelevant to my transcript. This shouldn’t be.
People complain about “new math.” Parents won’t know what to do with a number instead of a grade. A parent, like a smart Doper parent, might get it, but people are stupid.
Why not just a letter grade and be done with it? Seriously. I never in my life received a number grade for a class - in elementary school we had something along the lines of Excellent, Satisfactory, Needs Improvement and Not Sufficient. In high school and college it was the A,B,C, D,F system.
As **Chessic Sense **said, some assignments/tests are not suited to grading on a 100 point scale and some grading schemes are not suited to it either. For example, if a teacher gives only short answer tests and assignments and considers only test and assignment scores in grading a 100 point scale works fine. Once the assignments include papers or other projects ,or the teacher considers other factors (class participation or the completion of ungraded assignments) number grades suggest a precision that isn’t there.
All my English papers are graded on a rubric, which produces a number grade, which is converted to a letter. (Although the number is still factored into your term grade). I don’t know about other schools, but this is the standard for all papers in all subjects in my high school.
You’d have to ask your school board (or whoever set the policy) for the definitive answer. But I suspect it’s because some people find letter grades more meaningful.
Anecdotally, I can say that when I hand back students’ tests, with numerical scores on them, there will be at least some students who want to know what “letter grade” they got (“I got an A!” or “So that’s like a C, right?”), even though it will be the numerical score that is used in figuring their final course grade.
I don’t think all high schools do this. My high school records had no numerical scores, only letter grades. Individual teachers might use numerical scores throughout the quarter or the semester, but at the end, all they reported to the administration was a letter grade.
I’ve always wandered about this in the us, here in Chile we have a standard numeric scale from first grade to college, it goes from 1 to 7 ( you need a 4 to pass which, depending on the school is usually 60% or 70%). Letter grades are used in irrelevant things like religion (yes we have religion in schools), MB=muy bueno=very good,B=Bueno=good, S=suficiente and I=insuficiente
I think different schools will try different things. When I was in school we had a five point check system.
There was a category and
Excellent, Above Average, Satisfactory, Needs Work, Incomplete at the top
The teacher put a check next to the category. It was a grid system.
This went on till 6th grade. The incomplete I guess translated to an “F” but they didn’t want to fail you. This was in the 70s. You were expected to do extra work to make your incompletes up. And too many could result in you being held back a grade.
In junior high we switched to the A,B,C,D & F system and it included +/- (example B- or D+). In high school it was the same except, there was no +/- option. We also had the option of taking one class, per semester, as pass/fail. This would not count in your GPA, and it had to be an elective
I taught high school 'til 2010. From '93 to present, the grades were recorded and averaged numerically. There is a letter grade conversion table on the report cards, but the class standings, including valedictorian and salutatorian, are figured on the 100 point scale, not 1-4.
I’m pretty sure all public schools in Georgia are required to keep grades using percents, not letters.
When I went to school in New York, during the 60s, we only had numerical grades on a scale of 0 - 100. 65 was passing, grade went up in increments of 5 beyond that to 85, then 88, and then 90 where they went up in increments of 1. Nobody even mentioned letter grades. I think tests and papers were graded numerically also.
Just don’t do what my 9th grade gym teacher did. He graded us by giving us a number of tasks, with a letter grade given on each. Then, the letter grades were converted to numbers on the 4-point scale, the numbers were all added up, and converted to a percentage. That percentage, on the 90-80-70-60 scale, gave your overall grade for the class. So, for instance, if you got a C on each of the tasks (2 out of 4), that would average out to a 50%, or F, for the class.
I have the same grumble about my nursing school. In every other class in the school the cutoffs were 90-80-70-60. In nursing classes, it was 97-92-88-84. And you needed at least a C in every class to progress.
So I ended up with A’s and B’s, which would have been all A’s in other classes. And because they then convert those A’s and B’s to 4’s and 3’s to determine your GPA, I ended up with a 3.something, instead of a 4.0. Blech. I look like a worse student than the guy who majored in business, even if each of my percentage grades was higher.
Why not just make it the same grading scale as the rest of the school and make it so you have to have all A’s to progress?
I would think that the letter grading system is more suited to a settings where the teachers have a good feel for the child’s grasp of the subject and a number grade more suited for a more objective way to evaluate.
I feel there is better accountability for a teacher’s reasoning and grade methodology with numerical scores. They’re simply more accurate. A more holistic method of grading (this paper feels like a B+!) sounds good; it would be good, if every teacher was an android. But they aren’t. There’s too much leeway to give undeserved good or bad letter grades without having specific numerical documentation of “why.” If the teacher doesn’t like you, she could grade you poorly without having to document. And vice-versa if the teacher prefers you, she could artifically inflate your grades.
Instead of saying, *“Johnny lost 2 letter grades for poor spelling and improper formatting,” *it’s more accurate to say “Johnny lost 1 point for each of the 15 words he spelled incorrectly, 5 points due to incorrect margin spacing, and 5 points for increasing the font size to artificially inflate paper length.”
So why letters? The only possible useful application I can think of is for classes that grade on extreme curves, where the percentage doesn’t tell the whole story. I got a 59% in my first college calc class, a 100-level weedout for science/engineering majors. That was a solid A after the curve.
No, they’re more precise. There’s a difference. In your example of Johnny and his poor spelling, a different teacher might take off 2 points for each misspelling, 1 point for incorrect margins, and evaluate length by word count rather than pages and so completely ignore font size. Or, for that matter, grading based on the numerical length at all is really pretty arbitrary: A proper grading scale should put more emphasis on whether the student said enough to make his point, and not just whether he used enough words. In this sense, “Well, I guess he did a decent job of making his point, but not great, so I’ll give him a B” is actually less arbitrary than “It filled up three pages at 12-point Times New Roman, so that’s good enough”.
If only this were the standard expectation, instead of the exception. Teachers typically look at length first, and content second. My AP English teacher would actually throw away a paper sight unseen if it didn’t pass the formatting requirements, length included. I’ve never been assigned a paper without a non-debatable length requirement attached.
I can’t even begin to remember the numbers of papers I had to pad in high school, and again for various college courses, to meet arbitrary page or word-count requirements. Frankly, it’s a handicap for students who’ve learned to cut out the fat and compose concisely. I know I’ve edited many fellow students’ (or relatives’) papers, and cut them down to as little as half the original size while maintaining the content. But due to word-count provisions, they ended up keeping the original long-winded version.
I have heard anecdotally that the teacher in some cases has wide latitude in figuring out the grade for the year or for the quarter. And when you are figuring out a “just” grade out of thin air, it’s a lot easier to pick it out of (A : C-) options than specify a precise value of 87.6.