<p>This is one of the biggest problem I have with US schools. We are expats from Finland. I got most of my schooling there, so did my husband. Our kids has had most of their earlier schooling there. In Finland the grading system is exam focused. Grades are from 4 to 10 and course grade is (average of) your exam grade(s) plus/minus one grade for classroom work and homework. 8 is considered a good number (kid has met all the academic goals for the course) and maybe one or at most two kids at class get a 10. Best GPA’s in any given school are usually between 9 and 9,5 very seldom anyone gets better. I have never personally met anyone, who has had better GPA than 9,6. Practically all exams are mainly essays or problem sets. Usually very little multiple choice-questions. It’s not the perfect system, far from it, but one thing I have had a lot of trouble getting used to here is, that grades simply tell very little about what my kids have learned. If my kid gets an A, I do know that they have been at class and they have turned in their homework and that is it. It tells almost nothing about if my kid has learned the material or not. It also tells nothing about how my kid did compared to other kids. In our kids school I think one third or even more of students do get an A and it seems that almost all the neighbours kids have straight A’s or almost.</p>
<p>It’s of course nice and all that and make kids feel good for themselves, but I worry that my younger kids will be in for shock of their lives when we one day move back and they will put their feet into Finnish school and have to survive there. Or even worse, Finnish university ( I can still remember those dreaded grade lists on the wall there 200 students took an exam, 170 students got 0 (In Finnish universities grades are usually from 0 to 5, zero is failed), 20 got 1, 7 got 3 and 3 got 5. Yes, we were allowed to do multiple repeat exams for courses to pass them or even to get a better grade.)</p>