<p>maybe the professor really thought that you had an A- understanding of the material, and decided not to bump you up :D</p>
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<p>Explain to me why 90% is the One True Cutoff for A/B grades. Oh wait you can’t because it is totally arbitrary. Hell even with a shared cutoff percentage there is a lot of room for arbitrariness across professors due to toughness of grading.</p>
<p>“Explain to me why 90% is the One True Cutoff for A/B grades. Oh wait you can’t because it is totally arbitrary. Hell even with a shared cutoff percentage there is a lot of room for arbitrariness across professors due to toughness of grading.”</p>
<p>Because in 95% of all classes I’ve taken 90%+ is an A, that’s the accepted conversion value. It’s not arbitrary at all. Again, I ask *** is with all the freaking “its black and white” knight templar students. Yakyu, Dartmouth, square, you three are being extremely immature and it’s clear you lack critical thinking skills. You accuse him of having to “grow up” when you’re acting like little uptight children who’d sooner die than bend a rule even slightly, it’s a bad look. But it’s Christmas and you know what, I don’t have the strength to argue with immature little brats.</p>
<p>Nobody GAVE you the grade. It’s the one you EARNED.</p>
<p>"Explain to me why 90% is the One True Cutoff for A/B grades. Oh wait you can’t because it is totally arbitrary. "</p>
<p>Incorrect. 45%-56% =A 57%-100% =B 30%-44%=C 5%-29% =D 0%-4% =F</p>
<p>“Dude it’s high school, those high school teachers failed college so badly and ended up with a crappy job like now.”</p>
<p>One of my high school English teachers went to Yale. Another went to Harvard…</p>
<p>Your teacher should have lined up all the grades AFTER ALL THE GRADES WERE ALREADY DETERMINED, looked for statistically significant breaks in scores, and determined the grading scale based on these breaks.</p>
<p>That said, under the idiotic scale that the professor imposed, a 91.87% doesn’t deserve an A anymore than a 92.13% deserves an AB. But you can’t give a 91.87 an A and then give a 92.13 an AB. The arbitrary cutoff at 92% has to be strict, otherwise it’s meaningless.</p>
<p>I wasn’t trying to be a “knight templar” but it really is annoying when someone says, “Why do they purposely want to fail or give bad grades to students? It’s not like I’m a bad student or anything.” … showing a pattern of thinking that doesn’t own up to what one has done, and instead tries to place the blame on external factors. The situation has happened to me before. I got an A- when I got 91% and didn’t make the 92% requirement for an A, but I didn’t go on CC and make a thread complaining about how my prof loves to fail people.
It’s not a mature way to think about school. Really, a B+ is not the end of the world. A “B+” never killed anybody. (I think)</p>
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Hah yeah right. </p>
<p>There was a guy who got a B+ in math and accordingly gave up on being a mathematician and instead focused on writing, the latter of which became his career. No, his fictional works did not prompt any suicides/murders. Being a writer, though, he hung out with a faster crowd. One time he and his friends celebrated his novel’s publication at his apartment. Drinks got passed around, and since the writer wasn’t a mathematician he couldn’t count how many drinks one of his friends had. His friend decided to drive home, and no one stopped him. On his way back he crashed into another car. Although everyone in the accident was okay, traffic had to be stopped on the highway to clean up the wreck. A woman who was driving to go stop her boyfriend from participating in a gang war was stuck on the highway with no other options (she couldn’t call the cops, obviously). She couldn’t reach her boyfriend in time and he got shot and killed in the subsequent gang war. </p>
<p>OK I made that up, but I’m sure people have modified life aspirations because of a B+, and everything after that is history. If my dad got one more B+ in college he might not have been able to get into the law school where he met my mother. I wouldn’t exist, which is being “dead” in a way.</p>
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<p>Bull.</p>
<p>The professor didn’t “give” you anything…you got the grade you earned. Grow up and take responsibility. If you’re that desperate for a 4.0, you might want to examine your priorities.</p>
<p>Only on CC.</p>
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Okay maybe no one changes their major on the spot just because of a B+ (I bet people have though), but a B+ will influence class decisions, extracurricular activity participation, etc. All you need is to think: “Man, I don’t want to keep getting B+s in my engineering classes, maybe I’ll take a polisci class to boost my GPA.” Or “I think I’m going to retake the biology class because of that B+, but I guess that means I won’t be able to take that film studies class that seems really interesting.” Or “I got a B+ in calculus last semester, so to make sure I do well in my linear algebra class this semester I won’t audition for the spring musical because I want to focus on my studies.”</p>
<p>All it takes is one of these easy decisions. Like I said the rest is history, and someone will die or at least not be born because of that one decision.</p>
<p>Senior, that’s terrible logic.</p>
<p>By the same reasoning, I could argue that since your Dad went to law school and met your mother, someone else doesn’t exist because your Dad never met some other hypothetical chick.</p>
<p>Yes you could argue that. So getting the B+ kills someone, but getting the A- also kills someone (most likely a different person). I never said anything to the contrary. I just said getting the B+ kills someone. For all I know though getting the B+ can save thousands of lives, but someone would still die because of it. </p>
<p>Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my parents never met. I know I wouldn’t exist, but who would? </p>
<p>Anyways how is it terrible logic?</p>
<p>Because [most] people know that a B+ isn’t going to change your GPA that much, especially if you usually get solid A’s. That’s like, what, a .3 difference?</p>
<p>It just doesn’t make sense to complain about a B+ when the average college GPA is like, what, a 2.0?</p>
<p>Cutoffs have to be set at somewhere.</p>
<p>Use this logic: suppose the teacher did decide to round 91.5% to an A; wouldn’t that be the same as giving everyone a 0.5% boost and not rounding? So, what happens to the guy who had 90.9% originally? Is that also an A? What if the teacher has already adjusted the grade?</p>
<p>As for how the GPA goes, I do agree that things are much better with the 13-point scale instead of the 5-point scale used in high school.</p>
<p>Although, at my college, it’s common practice for the professors to simply state up front that a significant percentage of the grade is subjective – sometimes, they can be used to cause people who have the same percentage to differ by a complete letter grade. Sometimes, this bit of subjectivity is extremely important, especially for good students who happened to have a bad day on the final.</p>
<p>Hitler didn’t get into art school :O</p>
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<p>Made me laugh… esp because this is the focal point of the story :P</p>
<p>All I can add to this thread is that I was .13% under an A in my biology class, and my course coordinator rounded me up to an A this morning :)</p>
<p>^I wish I was that lucky…</p>
<p>Exactly. Bauman was lucky. That teacher was nice to him. Your prof was not being mean or trying to give you a bad grade. You, quite unfortunately, fell .13% short of the cutoff for an A.</p>
<p>I assume I was lucky. I did only miss one lecture (after I went to the Packer game on a Sunday night), and I didn’t miss a discussion. I don’t know how much that played into it though; my course coordinator was cool so I was probably just lucky to have him in charge.</p>