<p>Hey guys, I'm a senior in high school, and I'm wondering what the grading scenario is for universities - especially the UC system. Is the UC grading on a strict grading curve where like only 3-5% get an A in the class and most everyone gets Cs? Or is it based on a, "you get what you deserve" grading scale -regardless of a curve?
*Also I'd like to know about other colleges too. </p>
<p>And if grading is different for pre-req. classes and major specific classes could you let me know? thnx.</p>
<p>i go to UCI and the grading is really easy iv'e found in the large lecture classes. For Chem, an 84 or above was an A, and for Bio an 88 or above was an A (not A-s for either instance). If you just pay attention and read your notes you'll be fine.</p>
<p>"3-5% get an A"...lol more like the top 10-15% get A's (includes A- too). At UCLA, the chem class i took last quarter was curved to a 76% (i think) which translated to a B-, and the bio class i took was supposedly on a straight scale. Personally, "you get what you deserve" in every class, and the curve *usually, helps you more than it hurts you.</p>
<p>First realize that most grading is dependent on the professor and what they want to do.</p>
<p>Second a lot of people get "curve" and "scale" confused - they are not the same things. When someone says "oh that pre-med gunner wrecked the curve!" they really mean they ruined the scale. </p>
<p>A true curve is what you described - 3-5% getting A's, most people getting C's. Few profs will ever do this completely accurately because the statistics involved. Most who put people on a curve will assign grades based on the naturally occurring breaks in the class, with most getting a C of some sort.</p>
<p>A scale is when the class average (or occasionally the best grade) is moved up however many points to whatever the professor is choosing. So if the class will be scaled to a 76%, then the class average, even if it's a 30, will be moved, and everyone's grade will increase by 46 points. If the prof is taking the highest grade and setting it to 100%, then having someone get an extremely high score ruins everyone else's grade b/c it doesn't go up as much as it normally would. This happened on one of my first Sociology 101 exams freshman year - test was out of 50, prof put 5 extra credit points within the exam, and was going to scale the top score to a 50/50 after everyone had taken the exam...I ended up getting a 55/50 - which theoretically would have meant that everyone's grade would have gone down 5 points. The prof instead went to the next highest grade and everyone but me got their grade marked up 4 points...</p>
<p>The thing is that the two terms get confused, and you need to be specific when you ask a prof about their grading system.</p>
<p>Cool. Thnx alot. Also a few more questions: 1) are the only things that matter in a class the midterms and the final? 2) Does homework usually weigh in to the final grade, and if so what is the percentage to which it will affect your grade?</p>
<p><em>I'd definately like to know where you are attending when you answer this.
*</em>Sorry if these questions seem lame. I guess I have all these ideas about college drilled into my head from watching movies.</p>
<ol>
<li>yes. rarely does homework ever count. one of my classes is 2 midterms (25% each), 1 final (50%)...some other classes have quizzes and a final...etc.</li>
<li>i'm only a freshman, but even the homework i turned in for an english class amounted to nothing more than about 5% of my grade.</li>
</ol>
<p>as for curving/grading, some classes are curved to b-/c+ (at ucsd). probably 1-2 people out of 300 in a class get the a+ (not that it makes a difference to your gpa, although it would look nice). some classes are 20% A, 30% B, 25% C, 10% D/F with the rest as being +/- variants of the ABCDF distribution (which i suppose this scheme could be a b-/c+ curving scale). some classes are absolute grading with leniency, as in, if you get >90%, you get an A, but if half the class gets above 90%, you will still get the A. the curve can be lowered but never higher depending on class performance, in other words.</p>
<p>But another danger to the curve is if a 44 in Chem 1a is an A, fine, but what happens when you get to chem 1B? Do you understand much of the 44% of chem 1A you learned? That is the risk to the curve! Also, my D had one UC science class where the lowest for an A on a mid-term was 97!!!</p>
<p>I had classes that had all sorts of different weights to homework, quiz grades and exams...some classes homework made up like 40% of the grade (I hated that class). In my organic chem class (which was graded on a true curve with the class average equal to a C+) we had exams of 250, 490, 680, 830 and a final worth 1000 points (the prof was artificially creating separation between students to facilitate a curve by making the exams worth so many points) and yet we had weekly quizzes that worth 10 points...which didn't make a whole lot of sense. Exams from this prof second semester were worth even more points.</p>
<p>About the issue of curves causing students to go into the second class of a series without scoring a high percentge on the tests for the first class: I think the thing to realize here is that unlike high school, many college classes (especially pre-med weeder classes!) don't have tests where you can just memorize the required information, spit it back out, and get a 90%. Instead, profs tend to use the information they taught in class as a springboard for more analytical problems, many of which are very difficult and may require thinking beyond what the students were taught. The professor doesn't expect the majority of students to be able to do these problems correctly in a two-hour timespan, which is why the prof doesn't use a strict 90%A, 80%B grading scale... I know a lot of my chem/bio profs have been upset when the class mean on tests went above a 65% or so, because they think it means they made the test "too easy"--not that the students just happened to study well!</p>
<p>So honestly... getting a 44% on a test in chem 1a, if in fact that was an A, is not bad at all. It means that the professor thought that only very exceptional students should be able to get more than 44% of the problems on the test right, not that the student only learned 44% of what was taught in class!</p>