Grade (education)
A grade in education can mean either a teacher's evaluation of a student's work or a student's level of educational progress, usually one grade per year. This article is about evaluation of students' work.
In the United States and some other countries, teachers generally grade students with a letter from A through D (inclusive) and F (E is generally not a grade because it is the first letter of the word "excellent" and can be mis-interpreted if it meant failing); the nearer the start of the alphabet, the more positive the grade. In many schools, the system is made more fine-grained by allowing a plus or a minus to be added to each letter. That is, if we take > to indicate "is a more positive grade than", then the grading system can be summarized as follows:
In mathematics and other subjects where test questions are generally objective, contemporary teachers usually compute grades in the following way:
The A-F system
"Equal opportunity" grading
In contemporary practice, the conversion from percent to letter grade is usually made by a correspondence approximately like this:
| Percent | Letter | Points | |
| Excellent | 90-100 | A | 4 |
| Good | 80-89 | B | 3 |
| Average | 70-79 | C | 2 |
| Barely Passing | 60-69 | D | 1 |
| Fail | 0-59 | F | 0 |
(In practice, the exact percentages can differ from this general picture by several percentage points, sometimes even from teacher to teacher within the same school.)
Note that, in this procedure, one student's grade is independent of his or her classmates'. Thus it would be possible, for example, for everyone in the class to get an A.
This is contrast to "grading on a curve", which places students in competition with one another. In its most rigorous application (usually in a classical education setting), grades are parceled out according to a strict bell-shaped curve. The top achieving student set the mark for the group. In that setting 7% of students would receive "A", 24% - "B", 39% - "C", 24% - "D" and 7% - "F." Exactly what scores would count for each grade would be determined by the highest score obtained. Note that since the mathematical range of scores does not factor into this calculation, scores receiving an "A" grade can be either numerically very near or numerically very far from the scores receiving an "F" grade.
Note that applying this rigid procedure correctly generally makes for long examinations, so that the results can be statistically significant.
This system tends to foster a large amount of competition among students, and gives a strong incentive to cheat. Additionally, students who score well on tests may not be liked. It may also increase dropping out of school among the students who tend to get lower scores, and who thus face a constant battle to stay out of the "F" group. Due in part to these factors, it would be rare in American public education today to find an instructor who still graded this way.
When considering what a grade means, one should keep in mind which system is being used, or else confusion may result. A number of people are used to taking a "C" to mean "average", for example, but whereas this is indeed the case if the traditional curved grades are used, this will probably not be the case in a non-curved system.
Grade point average is a number quantity representing a student's academic performance of a semester, trimester, or school year. The calculation of GPA varies from school to school, but most of the time it is some form of average of the course grades and course credits.
Most high schools and colleges in the United States have a GPA range between 0 and 4. The letter grade equivalents are:
Cumulative GPA is the average of the student's GPA since entering the school. For the purposes of university admissions, high school GPAs are sometimes weighted. This typically involves giving additional point value to advanced courses.
In Germany, a 6-point grading scale is used, where:
In Russia, Ukraine, and likely the rest of the former Soviet Union, a five-point grading scale is used, where:
In Croatia and likely the rest of the former Yugoslavia, a similar five-point grading scale is used, where:
In The Netherlands, grades from 1.0 up to 10.0 are used, with 1 being worst and 10 being best. Generally one decimal place is used, and 5.5 and up constitute a pass whereas 5.4 and below constitute a fail. If no decimal places are used, 6 and up is a pass and 5 and below a fail.
Universities in Italy use a 30-point scale simply divided in two, non passing (0 to 17 points), and passing grades (18 to 30 points). Students having a particulary good result can get a "30 e lode" (30 and praise).
Grade inflation is the situation wherein a fixed letter grade comes to represent a lower level of student performance than it used to, where student performance is determined by some fixed, non-grade form of assessment. The most common forms of non-grade reference assessment used in discussions of grade inflation are the SAT and the ACT.
There are several complications to keep in mind when thinking about grade inflation:
Note that grade inflation and grade deflation have both occurred any number of times in the history of the ABC system. That is, the meaning of any particular letter grade is highly dependent on historical context. As such, it would be at least somewhat misleading to say that grade inflation reflects teachers' misunderstanding of or disregard for the "true meanings" of each letter grade.
It is well-documented and widely accepted that grade inflation is currently taking place in both high schools and colleges, at least in the United States. Note that this by itself does not establish anything about grade inflation, because it makes no reference to a grade-independent standard. Actual claims about grade inflation are usually made with respect to the SAT; researchers might show that an A today corresponds with a lower SAT score today than an A 20 years ago did. This need not be the case, however; an alternate hypothesis would be that students are working harder.
Furthermore, establishing that grade inflation has indeed occurred need not mean that standards have been lowered in any meaningful sense. For this to be the case, two further conditions must hold:
People have objected to several of the effects of grade inflation, including:
Consensus among educators in the United States is that grade inflation is a real phenomenon. An often-cited cause for this is pressure upon the teacher: Educators are pressured by parents, students, and schools to give higher grades. This is especially true since, if other schools are inflating grades, any school that takes a "hold out" stance will place its students at a disadvantage.
Many schools exhibit increases in grades that may not be related to a decrease in academic standards. Alternative theories regarding the increase in student grades over the years:
Grading "on a curve"
Confusion between the two
Grade point average
Although not universal, at some schools add .3 for a "+" grade and subtact .3 for a "−" grade. Thus, a B+ yeilds a 3.3 whereas an A− yeilds a 3.7.Other grading systems
Five and six are both considered to be failing grades, though in earlier years students are not required to repeat classes with '5' grades if they perform well in other classes. In converting German grades to the A-F scale, a 1 = A, ... 4 = D scale is often used (with 5 and 6 both convereted to Fs) but this conversion is not entirely accurate, since, for example, a grade of '2' is considered more difficult to obtain in Germany than a 'B' in the United States.
Students in these countries may be labeled by their teachers according to their average grade, the labels stemming from their respective digits; for example, someone with a 5-point average is a пятёрышник (m) (pronounced: pyatyorishnik, from Russian "5," пять (pyat'))/
пятёрышница (f) (pyatyorishnitsa), while someone with a 1-point average is a еденишник (m) (yedyenishnik, hard to see if you don't know Russian, but from Russian "1," один (adin))/еденишница (f) (yedyenishnitsa).
Teachers in grade schools and high schools are also allowed to record individual exam results with grades such as "3+" or "5-" or "3/4" which indicate varying ambiguities, but final grades at the end of the year need to be one of the basic five. An arithmetic mean is usually calculated, with X.45 being the threshold.Grade inflation
For schools that do not modify their letter grade vs. grade-point reference regarding AP classes often inflate grades by means of an "AP curve", the formula for which is , where x is the true grade and y is the curved result. The effect of this curve increases for lower grades: a grade of 100 is unchanged, while a failing grade of 36 is padded by an additional 24 points, thus making it barely passing in most jurisdictions. The AP curve is generally considered a fair retribution for the added difficulty of AP classes.Alleged problems
Causes
Alternative theories
See also
External links