Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What percentage equals an A ??

This is what our school uses except that 96 is an A+, not 97.
Personally, I think grades are less and less meaningful. All the kids in honors classes basically get A's and B's; C's mean you did especially poorly and A+'s mean you are either really good or just didn't make mistskes. It sort of irritates me when teachers say they want everyone to have at least a B - it just pushes up the average so an A can mean a wider range of things, and I wish high versus low grades actually told you how much you know. (That being said, everyone must pass Government with a good score and I completely agree.)

At DS's H.S. and the junior high grade are very rigid.

90-100% A
80-99% B
70-79% C
60-69% D
<59.9 F

And there is some graduation for +'s an -'s, I not precisely sure where those lines are ... I think it's

90.0 <= A- < 92.5 <= A < 97.5 <= A+

Repeated, for the other grades. Except F's are just F's. What is different is some teachers round at different places so my son got a A- last semester with a 89.97 and a different teacher might call that a B+. Teachers and classes differ a LOT how much different assignments score, but finals are no more than 15% of the grade. And there can be no more than 3% extra credit awarded. Teachers even those teaching the same class sometimes weight different assignments even for the same class differently, so you can get a teacher where test grades matter more than homework or vice-verse. There is no curving. If everyone deserves an A, everyone gets one. But this rarely happens for semester grades because the teachers just grade the next assignments harder if they do. If all students do very poorly on a test, I've seen teacher re-think some of the questions and up everyone's grade.

There is one exception to this rule, ONE English teacher my DD had graded on a much lower curve. I don't remember but a 50 was a C or something along those lines. Freaked out a lot of students.

When I was a student in High School teachers often graded on a Curve. Very maddening, although it usually helped students not hurt. Top score might be a 89/100. And that was certainly the case in university. My husband grades his university classes on a 'curve', BUT it's not a "true" curve where 10% must fail, and 10% get A's and most students get "C"s. It's more look at the grade distributions, have a lower bound that isn't passing and assign grades based on what usually end up as obvious clusters with a goal of fairly evenly distributing the grades between A-C, giving out only minimal and usually deserving D's & F's.

Here's a cautionary tale some of you may enjoy or benefit from knowing: In a computerized system which calculated course grades and grade point average to four decimal places, teachers learned they could assign numerical grades to several decimal places. For example, a teacher might enter 94.9999 or 95.0001 for an essay grade. In this particular electronic grade reporting system, once grades were "rolled up" at the end of the grading period, the detail of each assigned grade was not available to be viewed. Therefore entering grades in the electronic gradebook on the last possible day allowed a small window of opportunity for viewing these detail assignment grades prior to their "roll up" or summation.

However a curious, conscientious gifted kid with an interest in math happened to discover this pattern. When a particular teacher consistently entered grades on the last possible day, and several subjective assignments received grades to several decimal points, it gave the appearance of "designer grades" and attempting to manipulate student GPA and transcripted letter grades, while reducing access to the "paper trail" of individual assignment grades. For example, 95.0001 or 95.1234 for an essay grade might result in a student course final grade of A, while 94.9999 or 94.8765 for the essay grade would result in a student course final grade of A-.

I like that. Actually, quite a bit - I like how grading on a curve reduces grade inflation/high amounts of A's and B's, but it always did bother me how 10 percent had to fail. I don't think teachers should fail students "because it fits the curve", only if they truly don't deserve to pass. It seems to me like that many kids wouldn't be failing in every single class, and some especially tough ones could potentially have more.

Our middle school uses the traditional 90-80-70-60 as the cut for A-B-C-D. I do think that grade inflation is definitely an issue but at the same time many assessments (other than unit tests) and daily classwork tend to be less than 10 points so to achieve 90% average means that you often need to earn all the points (4/4, 5/5, 6/6, ...).

Another reason why frequent assessment sucks.

This drives my ds crazy.. especially on LA and Spanish. Tons of small quiz with 5 answers.

Another thought: How would you grade a 6th grade Students taking an High School Honors Algebra class. Some schools have Honors classes weighted anyway.

I also question how easy/hard assignments and homework are, considering my ds11 (in 6th grade gifted program) gets at least 90% in every subject every quarter (this includes several grades for each subject. (e.g. in ELA, they get a grade for language skills, reading comprehension, speaking and listening and writing composition). I can't figure out if he's doing really well, or if the work is just easy ?? Despite what I've been told over the years by his various teachers, I am still trying to figure out if he's gifted or a "high achiever".

I've read that frequent assessment improves learning. A recent paper is Daily Online Testing in Large Classes: Boosting College Performance while Reducing Achievement Gaps. People upset over getting a B- for missing 1 point on a 5 point quiz need to develop thicker skins and to recognize that even A students will get B's on some individual assignments.

When that B means their entire high school GPA is never going to be as high ever again? No. And when the only way to get an A us utter perfection, every time? No.