<p>For those at boarding school already,
did your grades drop significantly compared to your previous school?
Is it easier to fail classes at a competitive boarding school?(i.e. Choate, Exeter, Deerfield)</p>
<p>My d’s grades went from the equivalent of straight As at her old school to the equivalent of mostly B’s with an A and C here and there at her BS. Of course the effort she puts forth now is MUCH greater than she ever had to put forth at her previous school.</p>
<p>My son’s grades have been a little higher at BS this year than they were at his private day school last year. One big reason his move from day school to boarding school has been relatively easy has been because he has repeated his grade (but none of his classes). Being a little more mature than his current classmates and having attended a rigorous private day school his four previous years, my son’s school switch was pretty smooth and easy…thank goodness.</p>
<p>im going to BS as a 10th grade but im a 9th grade in public high right now</p>
<p>My dd went from straight A’s in 8th, to a high b average.</p>
<p>I have a question at BS (HADES+ Groton i mean) do you have to do a lot of pointless busy work homework? If so does it count for a lot? How are grades calculated? How much weight is given to exams at HADES schools generally?</p>
<p>well, i’m not sure about other grading systems, but taft (and i think loomis) will not put down 0 unless you hand in an incomplete. meaning, if you get a 1/100 on your test, as a grade it will come out (at taft) as a 40/100. nice, right?
i mean, at taft (which isn’t as hard as the tier one schools, obviously), my grades dropped from As and Bs to Bs and Cs. but, ultimately, you make your experience. my grades dropped because i realized that it’s ridiculous to put so much focus on grades. live in the moment!</p>
<p>As a new upper at Andover, I got three 4s and two 5s at the end of fall term. It’s hard to compare those to traditional As and Bs, but I like to think that an Andover 5 is an A/A- and an Andover 4 is a B. A 6 is just pretty much out of this world, but I have yet to get a 6 as a term grade so all I can do is imagine what it must feel like to get one…</p>
<p>I got pretty much straight As at my old private school - here, I’m getting lower grades and working MUCH, MUCH harder for them.</p>
<p>is it a 1 to 6 grading scale?</p>
<p>TomTheCat, in a given class of 10 people, what would the breakdown for grading be?</p>
<p>Would it be somewhere along the lines of:</p>
<p>1 6
2 5’s
4 4’s
2 3’s
1 2 or 1?</p>
<p>if it helps, at taft, there would be one ‘1 or 2’, six '3 or 4’s, and maybe 2 '5’s. no one has a 6.
perhaps in a math class someone can get a 6, but it’s unheard of in the humanities dept.</p>
<p>Well, I have cousins who graduated from Andover in the early 2000s. One of them was the top student there…but he worked and studied like hell…</p>
<p>Compared to me who wont, by any means, touch textbooks unless when being forced…yikes!</p>
<p>Skisoccer, that’s usually a good estimate, with two exceptions. Rarely do people here earn 2s or 1s. This is for two reasons - most kids here are smart enough, motivated enough, and so used to success at a previous school that they wouldn’t let their grade get that bad. The second reason is that if it even got close to a two a student’s academic advisor would tell the student to sign up for free tutoring from the ASC (Academic Support Center). There’s a safety net.</p>
<p>The other exception is that in most humanities classes, teachers simply don’t give 6s no matter how skilled the student is. My English teacher, for example, simply doesn’t give 6s because she sees a 6 as a mark of perfection. Some of the kids in my class come pretty close to perfection, but as the saying goes, nobody is perfect. Thus, nobody receives a six.</p>
<p>That’s okay, though. Kids here only need 5s to get into Harvard…</p>