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A grade in education can mean either a teacher's evaluation of a student's work or a student's level of educational progress, usually one grade per year. This article is about evaluation of students' work.
In the United States and some other countries, teachers generally grade students with a letter from A through D (inclusive) and F (E is generally not a grade because it is too easy to falsify an "F" into an E" on a handwritten report card, which is the kind usually given out in lower levels of schooling); the nearer the start of the alphabet, the more positive the grade. In many schools, the system is made more fine-grained by allowing a plus or a minus to be added to each letter. That is, if we take > to indicate "is a more positive grade than", then the grading system can be summarized as follows:
In mathematics and other subjects where test questions are generally objective, contemporary teachers usually compute grades in the following way:
In contemporary practice, the conversion from percent to letter grade is usually made by a correspondence approximately like this:
| percent | letter | points | |
|---|---|---|---|
| excellent | 90-100 | A | 4 |
| good | 80-89 | B | 3 |
| average | 70-79 | C | 2 |
| barely passing | 60-69 | D | 1 |
| fail | 0-59 | F | 0 |
(In practice, the exact percentages can differ from this general picture by several percentage points, sometimes even from teacher to teacher within the same school.)
Note that, in this procedure, one student's grade is independent of his or her classmates'. Thus it would be possible, for example, for everyone in the class to get an A.
This is contrast to "grading on a curve", which places students in competition with one another. In its most rigorous application (usually in a classical education setting), grades are parceled out according to a strict bell-shaped curve.
| grade | percentage |
|---|---|
| A | 7% |
| B | 24% |
| C | 39% |
| D | 24% |
| F | 7% |
Exactly what scores would count for each grade would be determined by the highest score obtained. Note that since the mathematical range of scores does not factor into this calculation, scores receiving an "A" grade can be either numerically very near or numerically very far from the scores receiving an "F" grade.
Note that applying this rigid procedure correctly generally makes for long examinations, so that the results can be statistically significant.
This system tends to foster a large amount of competition among students, and gives a strong incentive to cheat. Additionally, students who score well on tests may not be liked. It may also increase dropping out of school among the students who tend to get lower scores, and who thus face a constant battle to stay out of the "F" group. Due in part to these factors, it would be rare in American public education today to find an instructor who still graded this way.
When considering what a grade means, one should keep in mind which system is being used, or else confusion may result. A number of people are used to taking a "C" to mean "average", for example, but whereas this is indeed the case if the traditional curved grades are used, this will probably not be the case in a non-curved system.
Grade point average (GPA) is a number quantity representing a student's academic performance of a semester, trimester, or school year. The calculation of GPA varies from school to school, but most of the time it is some form of average of the course grades and course credits.
Most high schools and colleges in the United States have a GPA range between 0 and 4. The letter grade equivalents are:
Although not universal, at some schools add .3 for a "+" grade and subtract .3 for a "−" grade. Thus, a B+ yields a 3.3 whereas an A− yields a 3.7.
Cumulative GPA is the average of the student's GPA since entering the school. For the purposes of university admissions, high school GPAs are sometimes weighted. This typically involves giving additional point value to advanced courses.
In Germany, a 6-point grading scale is used, where:
Five and six are both considered to be failing grades, though in earlier years students are not required to repeat classes with '5' grades if they perform well in other classes. In converting German grades to the A-F scale, a 1 = A, ... 4 = D scale is often used (with 5 and 6 both convereted to Fs) but this conversion is not entirely accurate, since, for example, a grade of '2' is considered more difficult to obtain in Germany than a 'B' in the United States.
In Russia, Ukraine, and likely the rest of the former Soviet Union, a five-point grading scale is used, where:
Students in these countries may be labelled by their teachers according to their average grade, the labels stemming from their respective digits; for example, someone with a 5-point average is a пятёрышник (m) (pronounced: pyatyorishnik, from Russian "5," пять (pyat'))/ пятёрышница (f) (pyatyorishnitsa), while someone with a 1-point average is a еденишник (m) (yedyenishnik, hard to see if you don't know Russian, but from Russian "1," один (adin))/еденишница (f) (yedyenishnitsa).
In Croatia and likely the rest of the former Yugoslavia, a similar five-point grading scale is used, where:
Teachers in grade schools and high schools are also allowed to record individual exam results with grades such as "3+" or "5-" or "3/4" which indicate varying ambiguities, but final grades at the end of the year need to be one of the basic five. An arithmetic mean is usually calculated, with X.45 being the threshold.
In The Netherlands, grades from 1.0 up to 10.0 are used, with 1 being worst and 10 being best. Generally one decimal place is used, and 5.5 and up constitute a pass whereas 5.4 and below constitute a fail. If no decimal places are used, 6 and up is a pass and 5 and below a fail.
Universities in Italy use a 30-point scale simply divided in two, non passing (0 to 17 points), and passing grades (18 to 30 points). Students having a particularly good result can get a "30 e lode" (30 and praise).
In Chile, grades from 1,0 up to 7,0 (with one decimal place) are used, where:
Generally, it's a linear scale, with 1,0 meaning 0% achievement, 4,0 meaning 50% achievement, and 7,0 meaning 100% achievement. Rounding of averages is generally done to the second decimal; hence, a 3,95 is rounded up to a 4,0, whereas a 3,94 is rounded down to a 3,9.
Degree grades:
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