<p>Well, who said HS students have a 100 pt scale anyway? I’d guess more high schools have a 4.0 scale than a 100 pt scale. At the very least, I do.</p>
<p>As for why the 4.0 scale is used on the college level…because of past precedent and because that’s the scale every single law school applicant in the US is given a GPA on (not sure about med school).</p>
<p>Maybe it’s because a 100 pt system penalizes you for tiny, ridiculous things - why on earth should it matter whether you got a 97 or a 99? It promotes grade-grubbing. Also, the letter grade system allows profs/teachers to set their own grade cutoffs, which allows them more flexibility with the difficulty of the work - you can fairly have much harder work and go much more in depth if everyone with an average above 85 (for instance) gets an A, than you can if every point matters.</p>
<p>Most high schools I know of use letter grades/4.0 scale.</p>
<p>At my university, it’s a 5.0 scale: A = 5, B = 4, C = 3, D = 2, F = 0. My theory on why they use this scale is so that they can penalize you extra for an F.</p>
<p>the percent scale also makes it difficult to curve or adjust grades. If you have an 89.8 and your teacher feels like you tried your best they can bump you up to an A-. It gives the teacher more flexability.</p>
<p>My HS used the 4.0 scale too, and gave nothing higher than a 4.0.</p>
<p>I’ve been taught in the public school system in NYC so all the schools I’ve gone through have always used the 100pt scale. I always figured it was like that for most other public schools then again my teachers always told me that what I see in the city is different from the rest of the world.</p>
<p>I personally don’t care what grading system they use but it’d be a lot easier if all schools just stuck with ONE system. One thing I don’t like about the 4.0 scale is that you can’t get a 100, the highest is basically a 98, an A+ or a 4.333. And that’s only if you’re school doesn’t cap it off at 4.0 because some schools give nothing higher than a 4.0 and some schools as mentioned here go a point higher than 4.</p>
<p>At my school all school grades where raised by increments of 5 up until 85 then you could get detailed by handing out an 88 or a 93 or 96, lower than an 85 and it had to be a multiple of 5.</p>
<p>Btw curving with the 100pt scale is not harder. I’ve seen many teachers do it. Some teachers took curving to an extreme though. I had a pre-calc teacher who used curving on just about all exams. Basically everyone in the class kept getting grades in the 30s to 40s on exams out of 100. And if you got a 40 you were happy because that was like getting an A in his class.</p>
<p>Well even more than that, grades themselves are differently. Like I’ve never heard of a school that had a “D” in their system or whose pass cut off was anything lower than 70- but I know they exist.</p>
<p>Plus all schools weigh differently. My school doesn’t weigh honors- only AP or IB. Since you can’t take AP until junior year, it’s almost a disadvantage to kids when they apply to schools that don’t reweigh grades and just take what schools give you.</p>
<p>Wow this is soooo weird. My school uses a 100pt scale and passing is 75 (3-5) and 65 (6-12). In k-2 we get vg/g/s/ns grades…in translation - very good, good, satisfactory, not satisfactory.</p>