<p>Yeah i go to MSU with romani, and we don’t have +/- grading, just 4.0, 3.5, 3.0 etc. I guess I don’t mind it at all…I definitely prefer it to the A, A-, B+ system.</p>
<p>My school uses plusses and minuses and its nice when I get an A plus (which has saved my gpa), but I hate getting A minuses. My mom went to college in Jordan where they used the 1-100 system and when she gave sent her transcript to US colleges they didn’t convert her grades into the gpa system. Just curious, are there any US colleges that use the 1-100 system?</p>
<p>I don’t think so.</p>
<p>The problem with the 1-100 system is that grades are not comparable. Suppose the highest test score in a class is 50. Well, it wouldn’t be fair to put 50 onto the transcript of the best student, would it? So then you scale the scores up, but what do you scale them to? Should the highest score be a 100 or a 90 or a 97? </p>
<p>On the other hand, suppose you have a class of 100 students with the lowest score being an 82. Are those the scores students should get, or would you scale the lowest grade down to, say, a 65? Or maybe a 70? Or 50? If everybody got A or B range grades, grades would be pretty meaningless.</p>
<p>I hate arbitrary decisions in an evaluation system, and more degrees of freedom (100-0 vs 4.0 - 0.0) will inevitably entail more arbitrary choices.</p>
<p>That’s why I really liked the grading standards at my (foreign) high school. Grades were to be scaled so that the class average came out to a 3.5 on a scale from 1-6. The only really decision teachers could make was about the grade distribution: are there one or two students who deserve a 1, or will be top grade be a 2? Are there students who should fail the class? </p>
<p>In this system, grades had a very well-defined meaning: they rates the performance of students *compared to their classmates<a href=“except%20for%20failing%20grades”>/i</a>. </p>
<p>That meaning is lacking in the US. Grades indicate a mix of my performance relative to my classmates, relative to the performance standards of the professor, relative to the grading standards of the professor, and relative to the grading standards of the university. There are too many unknown variables. GPAs from different universities are not comparable, GPAs from different departments of one university are not comparable, and even grades from different professors in the same department are not comparable. This leads to the following question:</p>
<p>What do grades mean at all?</p>
<p>I think we first have to establish what grades are meant to measure before we can choose an appropriate scale.</p>
<p>Fortunately this past semester (fall), I did not have to worry about plus or minus. I neither benefited or was hurt by it. </p>
<p>I love 4.0 gpas.!</p>
<p>For those of you who came up just short… 4.0 is really something special. So with plus and minus in effect, it makes it that much sweeter when you do reach this mark.</p>
<p>I don’t really like the idea of comparing to classmates either. At top schools, where everyone is generally a good student, it’s really competitive when classes are graded on curves. That means that even though you might be doing amazing work, it’s still really difficult to get a good grade.</p>
<p>you never hear pro athletes whining about how they have to play against the top players in the world day in and day out . . .</p>
<p>competing against top students is just something that comes with attending a top university. you chose to attend–no one put a gun to your head and made you go to wherever you go</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon was thinking about converting to the +/- scale several years ago. Most students were in favor of all of it except for having an A-. 
I think the +/- scale causes must more stress and pressure, which most of us college students definitely don’t need.</p>
<p>"The problem with the 1-100 system is that grades are not comparable. Suppose the highest test score in a class is 50. Well, it wouldn’t be fair to put 50 onto the transcript of the best student, would it? So then you scale the scores up, but what do you scale them to? Should the highest score be a 100 or a 90 or a 97?</p>
<p>On the other hand, suppose you have a class of 100 students with the lowest score being an 82. Are those the scores students should get, or would you scale the lowest grade down to, say, a 65? Or maybe a 70? Or 50? If everybody got A or B range grades, grades would be pretty meaningless."</p>
<p>You’re missing the point. I’m not talking about changing the way we grade–we leave that up to the discretion of a professor, as is the case now. I’m just talking about how we record grades on transcripts. For probably all science/math classes, and most humanities classes, grades represent a specific percentage of achievement (out of 100% obviously.) However, there are clear faults with the system, due to a percentage less or more resulting in a disproportionate difference in GPA.</p>
<p>I understand that that would be the motivation for recording grades on a finer scale. I was pointing out that the finer the scale, the more arbitrary the grades get once you have to start curving grades. It might be very clear to a professor that a certain performance is an A or a B level performance. But what percentage do you pick as the target range for an A? And what percentage do you pick for the B?</p>
<p>And why do you assume that grades would be curved in a linear way anyway (e.g. adding 20% to everyone’s score, or multiplying grades by a factor of 1.2)? Here’s a curve lazy me could use if I was a professor:
99% - 60% -> 95%
60% - 50% -> 90%
50% - 40% -> 85%
40% - 30% -> 80%
30% - 20% -> 75%
Recording grades on that scale is not any more or less fair than using letter grades to begin with. Of course, then I would get students who complain that I cap grades at 95% while their friends’ classes go all the way to 100%. Their bad.</p>
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<p>How is choosing a curving mechanism more arbitrary than deciding cut-offs for letter grades?</p>
<p>I have no idea what you’re talking about. Maybe I’m stupid, but I literally do not understand your reasoning. </p>
<p>Professors set their own target ranges for A’s already…</p>
<p>There are two choices here. One is which grades should be worth an A, as you pointed out. For example, professors might decide that raw scores down to 70% should be worth an A in a particular class. But in the percentage scale, there is one more choice: what percentage should an A translate to? You could decide that 70% is worth an A on a particular test. But “how good of an A”? 100%? 95%? 92%?</p>
<p>Next, suppose that the highest score on that exam was a 85%. Obviously you want to curve that up. But do you curve it up to a 100% or a 95%? Professors don’t get that choice with letter grades. They would assign the 85% an A and that’s that.</p>
<p>You also have much more flexibility when it comes to failing grades. There is a HUGE difference between failing with a 50% and failing with a 10%. If the grades happen to be an a curve, the professor can make that choice arbitrarily.</p>
<p>Deciding where to set the maximum numeric score is less arbitrary than deciding where to set the boundaries of A, B, C, etc.</p>
<p>For setting the maximum, the professor will go off what he thinks the best-scoring student deserves. This is the exact same judgment made with letter grading, except in that case the professor must make a lot of these ‘arbitrary’ judgments in grouping the A’s, the B’c, the C’s, etc.</p>
<p>I hate it when it comes to As
but don’t mind them at all it’s a plus for anything less than an A. </p>
<p>I know what you mean though. Last semester I would’ve had 4 As but after the final exam my grade dropped to an A- for two of my classes.</p>
<p>There would be way to many 4.0 students without A-s. Grades are inflated enough already.</p>
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<p>Not true. My school doesn’t grade on the plus/minus scale, and we have very few 4.0s. Grade inflation is non-existent here.</p>
<p>What do you consider grade inflation?</p>
<p>The average GPA at my college is 3.4, which is definitely inflated. The national average GPA seems to be in the 3.1 range, which is still inflated in my book. I grew up with grades being curved around a C. If grades were actually curved around a C, I would be fine with letter grades only. As long as the average GPA is above 3.0 though, I think we should keep that A-.</p>