<p>Brown, I will never understand this glorification of the past.</p>
<p>I have a question. Maybe this is the thread for it. When I went to college grades were curved but the methodology wasn’t so obscure. In my day they curved to the C. There weren’t any crazy standard deviations. The bottomline was the class average became the C and ten points over the average a B and ten points under the average a D and so on. Now a days, its nearly impossible, as a student, to have any idea what your grade is until your final grade comes in at the end of the semester or quarter. Does anyone else find this annoying. My experience has been with my son and my nieces and nephews that no one knows what the class is curving to. Sometimes they curve to a B+ or B or C. Its a mystery everytime. I’m a bit surprised that more students don’t find this annoying. If it were I, I would be very stressed by this. I always liked calculating my grade and knowing what i needed to get on the final to get an A or whatever. I’m shocked at how mystifying the grading system has become.</p>
<p>Fwiw, I’ve only had like 3 classes curved like ^ that. Every other class is off some sort of set scale.</p>
<p>Wow, my S is a sophomore and my niece is a junior and they haven’t had anything but this obscure grading. I think its terrible. YOu never know where you stand.</p>
<p>@Dungareedoll: In my country, it is mostly like that. They don’t curve to raise students’ overall score out of 100. They curve to distribute the final letter grades at the end. But I don’t think that it is very necessary to get a letter grade for each assignment you hand in or for each test you take. You pretty much can guess how you are doing in your class relative to the others. Unless you are at the edge of passing/failing, then maybe a prof. can give you a warning.</p>
<p>Very apparently, grades in US are joke. In UK, for most “majors”, or whatever they call it, if you get 70 or more out of 100, then you are in the “first class” meaning A/A-/B+ range. It continues “second-upper” “second-lower” and “third class”… etc. To pass, 40% is enough.</p>
<p>Passing by knowing less than half of the material? That’s scary, actually.</p>
<p>Works in a lot of engineering programs. :)</p>
<p>As I said…</p>