<p>I heard that at UCLA and UC Berkeley, there is a limit to the number of A’s a professor can hand out (whether by university policy or by the professor’s own choice). For example, say only 7 kids can recieve A’s in a certain course. So the seven kids with the highest grades in the class will recieve A’s. The kid who has the eighth highest grade in the class recieves a B although his average may have been above 90%.</p>
<p>Is this so at UCSD?</p>
<p>It's called a bell curve. I'm pretty sure the grading scale is up to the professor.</p>
<p>yup, it's a bell curve and the profs can pretty do whatever the hell they want. the way most of my classes work is this: you have a mean grade and this will usually be the B-/C+ grade. then people who score a std deviation above the mean will get the A-/A. It pretty much works out this way. It's not like they can only hand out a certain amount of grades; you're just competing with your classmates. it's like, people will fail, but they deserve to fail. and if you really deserve the A, you wont get ripped off.</p>
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I heard that at UCLA and UC Berkeley, there is a limit to the number of A's a professor can hand out (whether by university policy or by the professor's own choice).
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<p>You answered your own question.</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>thanx for explaining the vocab guys. Can someone explain what standard deviation is. Wikipedia's definition is wayyyyyy too advanced.</p>
<p>The most important thing to know about standard deviation (in my opinion at least) is the 68-95-99.7 rule.
That is, 68% of all data (or test scores in this case) will fall within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% within two, and 99.7% within three. In terms of grades, this means if you're one standard deviation above the mean, you're in the top 16% of grades (is that right?).</p>
<p>Yeah that's right - about the top 16%.</p>