That's tough, but in truth if a student got a "D" which is normally 70-74 then they are learning something.
I agree with this move. High school is already ridiculously easy outside of honors courses, so a D really didn't mean much.
It depends on where you went to school I guess. I pulled my old high school transcripts and 70-74 was a "D" like I remembered. My kid’s school is the same way...70-74 is a "D" 75-79 is a "C".
I disagree. My first report card in HS was 6 A's and 1 D and that's essentially how it stayed (except one A became a B+ and I got a good grade on the final and pulled out a C- by 1%!), I worked my tail off that year more than any other thanks to that one class. I'm sorry, I know people who get D's now and then that are really trying and it would be a shame to set them back in life over an occasional bad grade. Some people legitimately struggle in high school. Also, imagine how much worse finals would be if you had a C? *shivers*. In my three schools in Colorado and my wife's college (UCCS) the grade scale was *usually* 60-69 = D.
I've been wondering about this. The grade scale, I mean - not NJ. Heh. I've stuck with the grade scale I grew up with, in grading my children's work, which was 93-100 A, 85-92 B, etc. Below 70 was fail. I thought that was standard, so I was surprised when we moved to Florida years ago and learned it's different here. Frankly, I would never say knowing 60% of something was enough to say you've got it and are ready to move on, even with a D/"passing grade." What really makes me wonder, though, is how it messes with GPAs for high school students applying to colleges that ask for that info. I mean, if one kid went to a school where 93-100 is an A, and another where 90-100 is an A, you can see real fast where student #2 ends up at a huge advantage in the GPA. But, I suppose the admissions people must take that into account, huh? (I certainly hope they do.) I have never seen that! So, does that mean that 80-89 is a B and 90-100 is an A? On our scale, 77-84 is a C and 70-76 is a D.
Many transcripts report the percentage for each course, not just the letter grade. My favorite iteration of the grading scale is a +/- version of the grading scale for GPA purposes. Something like this: 94-100 A (4.0) 90-93 A- (3.66) 88-89 B+ (3.33) 84-87 B (3.0) 80-83 B- (2.66) 78-79 C+ (2.33) 74-78 C (2.0) 70-73 C- (1.66) 69-0 F This allows for a better spread of GPAs. If you want to make even more room, you can add an A+ at a 4.33 GPA (although I'm not personally a fan of this).
I had no idea we have a limit on the time we can edit a post. Anyway, my husband has just told me that grade points are now determined numerically, not by letter grade, and that you can even get more points for a "high A" vs. a "low A" - sheesh. It was much simpler when it was A=4.0, B=3.0 and so on. ETA - LOL! Stefan, thanks for that. That's pretty much what my husband was just telling me. I honestly had no idea! Does anyone know when and why the range for As and Bs was expanded?
I don't know about at the secondary level, but Oberlin had A+ through C- when I was a student there some 23 years ago, and I know they'd had that grading structure for quite some time before that. Anything below a C- was "no credit" (failing), but it had the effect of compressing the entire grading scale, such that a B- was considered a low grade. Honestly, I think most grading scales are somewhat arbitrary because there's so much grade inflation now. I see collegiate work that 20 years ago would have rated a C or even a D getting As now; teachers and professors seem to be a lot more forgiving on sloppy research, bad grammar and spelling, and even plagiarism.
Sorry to back-track a bit, but, I suspect that when different grading scales are used the difficulty of the material also fluctuates; therefore, it may be that there is no way to accurately translate a grade when a student transfers to a different school. Unfortunately I cannot support the obvious solution of a Federal mandate standardizing things because that would simply be unconstitutional (not that the Fed is bothered too much by those trifling details).
Well, and not only that, but then we get into the issue of grading on a curve; a class full of students with strong academic preparation will do better in a given course than a class with poor preparation. If we used the same standard everywhere, it would take quite a while to be able to equalize the quality of education overall, and in the meantime, a lot of people would be at a severe disadvantage. Additionally, there are circumstances where it makes sense to grade on a curve. If we standardized everything and took that away, it could be problematic. Finally, as imperfect as they are, the GREs, SATs, ACTs, MATs, etc are all designed to try to standardize the innate ability, academic achievement, and other capacities of students. Perhaps more refinement of those measurements would be better than trying to standardize grading. But I'm not an educator so I can't really say.
I think overall it's awfully hard to compare one student to another in any sense, because even if we had some sort of standard curriculum and standard grade scale, you'd *still* have an issue of teacher variance; which is to say, one teacher could grade "hard" - I once had a teacher who marked off 10 points for any/each grammar or spelling mistake, no matter how minor, so you could fail an assignment quite easily - and another teacher could be much more lenient. My mother just mailed me some newspaper articles about how Texas is fudging the results of their standardized tests, using something called a "Projection Measure," which apparently allows a school to count a student who failed the TAKS test as "passed" because he is "projected" to pass future tests. That seems completely bonkers to me.
