To be honest, I would rather be fighting for a 90 than a 93 for an A.
Some of my classes make an A a 95, even. :((
It certainly makes 4.0s harder to come by. In high school that’s nothing special. But in college I think the divided grading system probably does a better job of separating students – who knows if your 4.0 is from all 100% grades or all 89.9%s that got rounded up?
I like to believe that it depends on the difficulty of the college, so that a 92 is an A at a hard school and an A- at an easy school. This almost certainly isn’t true, though (for example, Princeton has a plus/minus grading scale). It’s probably just to create more differentiation among the “good students.” It’s a superficial way of dealing with grade inflation.
To separate students who get a A from students who get an A-. Sure, it’s easier to get a 90 than a 93, but the students who put in the extra effort to get the 93, get a boost over the students who were only able to manage a 90.
Depends - MIT doesn’t differentiate +/- on external transcripts.
I think that while some +/- is certainly nitpicking, I think that a 10 point range is a bit too much as well. An 89.0 and a 79.9 are very different, but both would receive B’s without +/-.
In an ideal world, I think either dropping minus or dropping regular would work. Make each range 5 points: significant, but still differentiating.
Example:
A+ (100 - 95)
A (94-90)
B+ (89-85)
B (84-80)
Either way, I don’t think the +/- system has a flaw. They are significant IMO. Perhaps not in true educational value, but in the work put into the class for sure.
Lots of college courses do not grade on an absolute scale, or use a scale quite different from that you may see in high school, since the typical high school grading scale means that 70% of tests and assignments must be easy enough for C students to pass, so few more difficult problems to challenge B and A students can be given.
At my school, we get +/- grades even though they mean nothing to our GPA. Some professors use this to our advantage : if we have something like an 87, and they like us, they can hide our grade with an A- instead of giving a B+
First college i went to used less of a scale, A > BA > B > BC etc
Most did not like this because if you had 92% you got equivalent of B+ so 3.4 instead of 3.7 at other schools
But the truth is that class difficulty is so unbalanced across majors and schools that none of this means anything without proper context. I had a classmate at a junior college plagiarize an entire 2 pages on a project we did, and his punishment was 20% off the grade the rest of us got (and we did all the legit work), whereas at the college i’m at now, he would get an F in the class and possibly expelled.
In my experience, grad schools have a good grasp on this disparity, but not employers, who certainly wouldn’t know or care that spanish 231 is far harder than 232, math 105 harder than a lot of engineering classes, and rely entirely on school reputation, when there isn’t complete nepotism going on.
People also throw fits about grade inflation at ivys, but the simple fact is these are some of the top students in the world. It’s a lot harder to discern between their efforts