How bad is a "B" on math/science courses?

Quelloquialism
Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:11:10 +0000

“I’m still ranked 4 out of 490 though.” – that might be helpful to you. See, some schools (like my old HS) practice rampant grade inflation, such that pretty much anybody who tried got straight A’s. Class ranks were almost strictly based on the incredibly broken weighting system (5.0 instead of 4.0 for A’s in “honors”/“AP”/“IB” classes), so the top ranks generally went to people who gamed the system to get the most weighted and fewest unweighted classes.

If you’re at a school where your class rank can still be strong despite a few blemishes, I would hope that admissions could see that this most probably means that your school is “harder” and doesn’t give free A’s to everybody.