I was listening to the Casey Kasem broadcast on Siriux XM 70’s channel and thinking back to what I was doing when that show first aired this week in '78. It was the end of the quarter and finals would have been coming up. Back in the dark ages before the internet if you wanted to find out how you did in your classes they let you tuck a self-addressed post card the student store conveniently sold into the blue book. The prof or TA would write your score on the final and the grade in class, sometimes scrawling a note as well. I always thought it a bit amusing that our mail carrier was probably the best informed person regarding how the kids in the neighborhood were doing; I wouldn’t have asked my friends for their grades but he knew 
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I don’t remember those, but H and I were just talking about going to look at grades posted on the entrance door to the classroom building, all by social security number! So you’d go down and see this list of everyone’s full SSN’s and grades posted. Because what could you do with someone’s SSN? 
This was in the mid 80’s.
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Yep, I remember finding grades by scanning for my SSN on the list taped to the department or prof’s ffice door. I found out my final test grades by picking up my tests from the profs office, and term grades came via report cards in the mail. I never knew about grade post cards.
This was late 70’s, big U.
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We never had grade post cards in the 70s, when I was in HS & college.
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I went to college in the 80’s and remember both looking up grades wherever it was that they were posted and grade postcards.
They always mailed final grades home too and my mom would open them. Never bothered me but one time I was in the shower and my mom shouted you got a “C” ! (to her not a great grade) and all I replyed while holding my breath was "anything else? “Nope.” Did a little dance! I almost yelled “YES!” I thought I’d failed that stupid class–never been so happy!
But yes I remember going across campus with trepidation to look at posted grades and then the double checking to make sure you got it right following the little printed line from your SS to the grade. Some people would make someone else look first because the suspense was too much. And sometimes for number grades you’d have to look at the whole class grades to see where your grade might fit in a curve. Some classes literally only had two grades–midterms and a final–that was it–no homework, no quizzes–two grades.
I remember friends asking if you could look up their grade (they’d give you their social security number, no problem) and then call them if it was a B or better, but not to call if it was below a B. Didn’t want to ruin their beach weekend! There was always someone crying by the doorway outside the lecture hall where the grades were posted and you’d pretend you didn’t see them…
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My dad was always super about those really hard classes – he got a “2” or so in some engineering class way long ago–and it was the highest in the class. Most were negative grades. That was back in the '40s. No coddling there! Brightest man I know was my dad.
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Yes, I’m old. Got the postcards in the mail. Mailman was super nosy and made no secret of the fact he read them!
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I was 2 in 1978, but we still had to have report cards signed by the folks into the 80s and 90s (elementary school and high school).
Yes, grade postcards. (UCLA ‘93) I found some when going through an old box a few years ago. It was that or wait for transcript.
I remember being in middle school and the postman knocked on the door to deliver my report card - because he’d looked through the envelope and discovered I had straight As. So much for privacy, right?
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Interesting! I would have thought by then it would just be online.
At least, they were in privacy envelopes that folded over. (Though, I delegated opening to my mom on occasion—if they arrived at home before I did!)
When I was in grad school on the 90s they still used the ssn/door routine for grades, and mine was from a different state than most, so easy for people to figure it out.
Computers were expensive! And not very useful for the most part. Internet was dial-up and slow. It could take two minutes to just get to a website and there wasn’t an easy way to find anything. You’d type something in and come back in a few. The fun part was a “lucky circle” (it had a name but I can’t remember it) which you could click on like a wheel of fortune which would send you to a random web site just to find something new. If you liked a site you wrote the web address down because you might never see it again.
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