It appears that I’m going to get a lot of A-‘s and that brings up a question. Why do professors like giving out bad grades. I did really good on the second midterm and my professor made the final super difficult. It is so frustrating with the huge conflict of interest between my professors and I. I need good grades to go to grad school and to have grants and they want to give out the bad grades.I know grades shouldn’t be rewarded based on effort, but I work hard and I feel that I should get a good grade. It is also so frustrating when the tests make up like 80% of the grade and I’m doing good on them(90% plus average) and I’m still coming up short. It seems like the only thing schools care about is the students’ test scores. Because that is pretty much what your gpa is made out of. And then you have GRE or GMAT. Anybody else facing this level of frustration? I just wish I had more room to make a mistake on a test.
Are you saying an A-minus is a bad grade?
You posted about your grades back in April. I suggest that you look at that thread again - people gave you a lot of good advice.
+bodangles It is a bad grade because I want to go to grad school.
I think calling it a “bad” grade is still a bit of an exaggeration, but I wonder if this is the sort of reason why some colleges - mine included - have done away with the +/- system.
+MaineLonghorn My grades have improved since that time. I just feel like I’m walking on a thin rope. You miss a question on the exam and boom, your A is gone. I really know how important it is to get good grades and it is frustrating when I come up short, especially when I know I’m putting in the work.
An A- is a 3.7, which is excellent for grad school. As are for people who can get over 95. Which I’m sure there are people in you’re class that get it. Some schools deflate (like high school) others want there to be true Excellence for As. That would be close to a perfect score.
Get a job after college instead of grad school and you will only have to worry about impressing your boss 
Which may be harder than an A or not. Crap shoot!
+eliebham Wow! I wish my college did that. If not that, at least make the A range from 90 to 100. I have bad test anxiety and I tend to miss a question or two from anxiety. So if you’re taking an exam and you have missed 2 questions and get like a 90 on the exam when the exam is worth 25 points of your grade, that is 2.5 points gone from your grade from just error and you have 2 more exams you have to do. And then my professor truncates my grades on class assignments. So it is super super easy to not get an A in the class. I don’t think the classes are hard. A matter of fact, I would rather for them to be harder and to have the 90-100 scale than for them to be easy and have the 93-100 scale.
It actually tags people if you use the @ symbol, btw.
But a mix of A-minuses and A’s would put you in a very good position for grad school, no? I’d imagine it’s worse at schools with A-pluses. It’s difficult enough to get a 93. 97 would be pretty rare.
Professors don’t ‘like giving out bad grades’. Any reasonably good professor hopes that all their students succeed. But you have to hold something back to differentiate the exceptional from the really good (or, at the other end, from the mediocre from the really bad). With experience in marking papers you recognize ‘break points’, where the level of performance changes- the difference between an A- and an A. And as @suzyQ7 points out - a 3.7 for grad school is strong.
For some perspective, consider that there are are courses in the UK where your GPA-equivalent for your entire degree is based on a 15,000 word thesis and 6 3-hour exams taken at the end of your final year. THAT is test anxiety!
An A- is absolutely not a bad grade for grad school. An A- will not impair your ability to get into grad school.
Professors don’t like giving out bad grades (and of course, to repeat, an A- is not a bad grade). They want you to do well (and you did do well!), but they have to evaluate your performance somehow. Getting an A should be difficult, and professors can’t give you an A just because you worked really hard. That’s one of the things that (for many students) makes college more challenging than high school, where it might be normal for students to have 4.0 GPAs. There’s less homework and busy work to pad your grade, and many classes are more focused on exams or papers. This is why graduate schools and employees don’t expect students to have 4.0 GPAs, and there are often more that goes into your application than just your GPA.
Have you tried to find ways to cope with your test anxiety? You seem to be using it as a reason for why you miss questions on exams. What have you done to try and address this? I’m not saying you have to or even need to. You seem to be doing quite well, but if you feel like it’s impacting your grades and ability to succeed, you can try to get help to address it. Instead of complaining about your grades or wishing that the system would change (blaming the professors’ or your university’s grading system), you could try to adjust to it and find strategies to improve your performance.
That’s all said with the caveat that, of course (and I’ll keep repeating this until you get it), an A- is not a bad grade. I don’t care if you want to go to law school or med school or grad school or whatever school. That A- is not going to be the thing that keeps you out.
+SuzyQ7 It is crazy how I just read some articles online about grade deflation and you brought it up.I can relate to that. The reason why I don’t ever want to get a grade less than an A because I’m tired of my gpa being deflated and it is time for my gpa to be inflated to get even. I was an ECE student that had to deal with timing diagrams, logic gates, and programming. It is so, so easy to make a mistake on the test. Because of that, I was a B and C student my freshman year in college. And with this 4.0 letter system with the pluses and minuses, I was getting destroyed. When I graduated high school back in the day, we had a more fair system. Let’s say you got like an 88, a 92, an 85, and finally a 96. They would average all of those grades together and divide it by 25 to put it in a 4.0 system. You got every bit of what you earned. However, you didn’t get the inflation for getting an A, which seems nearly impossible for me to get at my university anyway. With this letter grade 4.0 system in college, 92.8 matters a lot compared to a 93. But as long as you don’t get below an A-, deflation will not be too big of an issue. A 3.67 isn’t too bad for a 92 in a class. But 1.7 for 72 in a class is just you being robbed.
@bodangles thanks for that tip. No the A+ will not hurt you because it will give you a 4.33 and the gpa is cutoff at 4.0. So if you got like an A-, which is 3.67, and an A+, which is an 4.33, it will average out to a 4.0, which is good for you.
But I’d still feel bad about myself if I had a 4 and a 4.33 was possible. 
@collegemom16 Yeah, but I’m trying to go to Ivy League, which that dream was lost like freshman year…lol. But it doesn’t stop me from trying to accomplish something that I was unsuccessful at previously.
@baktrax What you said is true. Doing some research, I have read that professor gives out 10% A’s in the more difficult classes and the number can really get crazy from there, like 35%. I do admit that is crazy. And students at my school are very smart. I go to a Big Ten school, which are pretty big and ranked pretty high. It just hurt not getting that A from mistakes and I have been trying to improve, but it is a difficult process. I guess you can look at it like this: improving your exam averages from 93 to 98 is a lot harder than someone improving their exam averages from 50 to a 55. When your test scores in the 90s, you’re studying every detail from the textbook and little room for error. So I feel like I was hitting a plateau with my exam averages. But something actually crazy happened this semester: I got three 100’s for this semester. I never had a 100 during my previous 4 semesters here. Now if I can be consistent at getting 100s, I should be to get above the 93 mark to get the A. I like to have my grade as high as possible going into finals’ week because of the lack of time that I have to study for each exam. It will allow me to relax more knowing that an 85% on the final would earn me an A vs. a 100 like I had to do with one of my classes this semester. Thanks for the advice and I appreciate the friendly community here. I have to admit, I was frustrated and I was able to talk it out here.
@bodangles Trust me, someone getting a 98 in a class doesn’t have to be like 70 IQ points smarter than someone that got like a 95. The difference could be from calculation mistakes…
Nope. I had a 3.42 GPA in undergrad, with many Bs, a couple Cs and even an F, and I still got into an Ivy league graduate school.
An A- is by no stretch of the imagination a “bad grade”. It is a very good grade.
And to answer your question, professors do not like giving out bad grades. In fact, some professors loathe giving bad grades, if for no other reason than they know it will bring anxious undergraduates to their office doors looking for a grade bump or extra credit. But even professors who don’t care about that don’t like giving out bad grades. They give out the grades their students have earned.
It is really important that you start to reframe your thinking. It is a good thing that the pursuit of what you perceive to be acceptable grades is motivating to you, however, you should listen to the people here who are telling you that the grades that you report you are getting are perfectly in range for graduate school acceptance. At this point in your academic career, it is far more important that you learn the material rather than simply kind of temporarily perform for a high grade. College professors assesssments often try to figure this out, did the student learn the material and can they apply it when faced with challenging problems, in some cases harder than any that you get in class. The professors are not giving bad grades, they are testing what you actually learned.
Well, calculation mistakes can be important! If a structural engineer makes one, the columns supporting the building you’re walking in may be undersized…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse - “At the time, it was the deadliest structural collapse in U.S. history, not surpassed until the collapse of the south tower of the World Trade Center in 2001.” The investigation showed it came down to a design change that failed to take into account a factor of 2. One mistake. I was studying structural engineering in graduate school when this happened. Scared the heck out of me.