<p>I will be entering college next year and am curious as to how grades are determined. Is it similar to high school or is it curved based on the class average? How hard is it to achieve an A in a difficult class such as math/science? At top schools, for example, what would the usual class average be and is it rare for someone to get a perfect score or even in the 90s?</p>
<p>Depends on the class and professor.</p>
<p>Depends, but (at least for me) tends to be relative to others in the class.</p>
<p>At my school, most of my classes are curved. Typically about 20% A’s, 50% B’s, 20% C’s, 10% whatever else, I think… at least within the CS department. Don’t know where +/- boundaries usually fall. The department has guidelines on what class averages are supposed to be, so the curve is more or less based on that.</p>
<p>I’ve had humanities classes (subjective paper writing things) that tended to be straight points classes… but that makes more sense, since they can assign A/B/C based on how students preform relative to others.</p>
<p>There’s also a weird middle ground… some of my technical classes have technically been straight points classes, where they give some rubric at the start of the year defining how many points you’d need for each letter grade. But those are derived from previous curves, and essentially just predict what the curve would look like if the class were graded on a curve.</p>
<p>So really, it just depends. A lot. Math/science curves tend to push you up… classes are hard, exams are hell, perfect scores are just really really hard. I’ve also heard horror stories from other departments at my school where the curve goes the other way, pushing students down even if they did really well. In my experience scores are usually relative to other students, but it just depends. What school you go to, which class it is, who’s teaching, etc. all play a role.</p>
<p>My daughter’s college did not grade on a curve or have + or -. Also anything less than a C just does not appear on your transcript. And you can take any class pass or fail and the fail will not be on your transcript. Yay Brown.</p>