<p>As several people have already pointed out, cutoffs have to be somewhere. It sucks that you fell short, but that doesn’t make your teacher a bad person. He’s following his own rules - 92% is an A, no rounding. There isn’t that much you can do about it, but there isn’t much he can do either. </p>
<p>If anything, I’d go and ask him if there is anything you can do, such as extra credit, to raise your grade. A few of teachers at my school would give some kind of project/assignment to someone if they ask for it. Be prepared for him to say no - if semester grades are already final at your school he can’t change yours.</p>
<p>The only thing that amazes me here is that a 90 is the typical cutoff… maybe it’s just engineering at my school, but typically above an 80 becomes an A… and it still only gives about 15% of the class As. Most of the teachers do standard distributions because almost noone gets legit As in engineering classes :)</p>
<p>As someone on the other side who does the grading:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>We don’t want to fail you. I don’t like failing students. Most professors want to see you do well. I have 40 finals to grade and if I could just give everyone an A, I would. Everyone would be happy, including me, because it would mean I didn’t have to wade through your handwriting during my holiday break. And it means that you guys would all go to your dream law schools and grad schools and med schools and be happy forever - win-win! Alas, I cannot give everyone an A. But it would be nice.</p></li>
<li><p>We don’t ‘give’ you bad grades. You earn them. Your professors and TAs are humans. We all went to undergrad once. The majority of us aren’t dicks just to be evil. We’re not intentionally withholding anything from you.</p></li>
<li><p>You don’t earn grades for effort. I have 80 students in my class. Of those 80 I have only interacted personally with some of them and usually that is only once. There are only two students who consistently come to my office hours and ask me questions. I have no idea how much effort you did or didn’t put into the class in most cases. So I’m grading what you give me on the paper. You can work really, really hard and still get a C if you don’t understand the material well. Welcome to the real world.</p></li>
<li><p>Even if we did grade on effort, simply attending class, doing the assignments and coming to office hours is not “A effort” necessarily. A means excellent. Anyone can sit in class for 2 hours a day and actually complete the assignments. But are they <em>correct</em>? You can show up every day, but if you do B work on the assignment I’m going to give you a B. You could spend every minute of my office hours in my office (and I will like you!) but if you do B work, I am going to give you a B because that’s what you earned. You earn your grades based on your performance and not effort.</p></li>
<li><p>Lastly, almost doesn’t count. I am under no obligation to round your grade. I am under no obligation to give you an A if you did B work, even if your B work was “almost A” work. Like someone else said, if you finish 117 credits of a 120 credit degree, you aren’t getting a BA. If you wanted the last 0.13 points, basically, you should’ve earned them. Understanding this has nothing to do with “immaturity” or being a ‘knight templar.’ In fact, the sooner you understand that you deserve only what you earn, the happier you will be, and the lower your blood pressure will rise in middle age. Sure, the professor COULD have tipped him over…but why?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>That said, though, I usually do round up .5 and above. I don’t do it because I feel like they ‘deserve’ the last 0.5. I do it because I don’t have time to deal with decimals and people coming to my office niggling over 0.5 points, and honestly IMO there isn’t a lot of difference between the work of an 89.5 student and a 90 student. So an 89.5 is a 90 in my book. Again, everyone’s happy.</p>
<p>Itachirumon, you need to remember that grading scales are different everywhere - a 90 isn’t always an A at every school. I think at my university (a top 5) a 92 or a 93 is necessary for an A.</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>