<p>Something has been confusing me for a while. My school calculates GPA as follows:</p>
<p>4.0 = A- or A
3.0 = B- B or B+
etc.</p>
<p>I know some schools do not give GPA (my first questions is why the heck would they not?) but instead give a number grade (e.g. 90).</p>
<p>At my school, no one even thinks of getting 95+ in most classes; A- is a lot more common than A. Yet, I see people on here complaining about getting 92s or 93s or 94s. When I first saw that I was like lolwut? My second question is, how can people (even though this is CC) get 95+ in almost all subjects? At my school, a 98 or 99 is almost unheard of. Secondly, why is getting less than 95 bad?</p>
<p>I honestly don't know how things work at schools that use numbers rather than letters for grades.</p>
<p>The ways schools calculate grades vary. My school is highly competitive, and 99 averages are achievable. I have a 98 3-year average. An A would be considered around a 94 or higher, a B the high 80s - low 90s, and so on. A 75 is the lowest passing grade.</p>
<p>My school tries it very best to keep the number of A’s to a minimum. I think they even [ one my teacher accidentally slipped and said ] have quotas to the number of A’s [ like a certain percentage ].</p>
<p>At my school, we had plus grades instead of minus grades. So it went A+, A, B+, B, etc. If you wanted the A+, you needed a 96 or higher class semester average.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say that we had rampant grade inflation, but having a perfect GPA for the semester wasn’t impossible. Our valedictorian had straight A+s five out of eight semesters, with the other three being As. But he had the highest GPA our school’s seen in the last like eight years.</p>
<p>My assumption is that the schools that use number grades have easier classes. I seriously do not imagine any person in the history of my school get a 95+ for a 3 year, let along the entire high school, average.</p>
<p>Oh I forgot to mention:</p>
<p>A or A- = 90-100%
B- or B or B+ = 80-89%
etc.</p>
<p>Well, a friend of mine used to go to Catholic private schools and she said that a cutoff for an A was a 93. However, that was in elementary school but I would imagine that the grading scale would be something similar for high school. She’s easily one of the smartest people in the class so I doubt that their grading scale reflects their intelligence.</p>
<p>Many of the contributors here have SAT and ACT scores in the 99th percentile or above; if only one-in-one-hundred students makes an “A” in a given course, it’s probably such a student.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The students who get into top schools are those who earn these “unheard of” 98’s and 99’s. I’ve earned two grades of 100, and two 99’s–I’m not sure how many 98’s. It’s quite simple really, work hard and be a standard deviation or two above any other student your teacher’s ever had.</p>
<p>Eh, in most Latin classes I expected to have above a 95. In Art History (and some other social studies classes), having below a 97 or 96 was upsetting to me. It’s not that those classes, or my school, is easy in general. Those were just the classes where I usually (in Art Hist, always) had the highest grade and cared to keep it that way. I don’t know anyone who can get such high grades in all f their classes for 4 years + 8th grade geometry, and since my school makes all A’s 4.0, no one has to.</p>
<p>90-100 A
87-89 - B+
86-80 B
79-77 C+
76 - 70 C
69 - 67 D+
66-60 D
59- … F</p>
<p>All my grades were above a 95+, except for Comparative gov’t. I got an 89.4 probably, which was super close to having my continuous straight A Streak. I’m a failure.</p>