<p>I have been looking at many other posts saying they have different grades during the semesters of school.</p>
<p>I am not sure why it matters if your child gets a B during a semester as long as in the end the overall grade is an A.</p>
<p>In my son’s school they do everything quarterly. So the final grade will be after all four quarters, midterms and finals. If one of those grades is a B why does it matter when after all are averaged the final grade is an A.</p>
<p>Example: 1st quarter: 97, 2nd quarter: 90, 3rd quarter: 97, 4th quarter: 94… midterm: 90 and final 93. The final grade would be: 93.9 or 94% and this would be an A. </p>
<p>In our school an A is 93% and higher.</p>
<p>Wouldn’t the grade college looks at be the final percentage only and thus a 4.0 in this class?</p>
<p>Every school does their transcripts differently. Some schools show each individual quarter or semester grade, while other schools show only the final year long grade. That’s why some people care and other’s don’t have to worry about it.</p>
<p>At my high school all of our semester grades were on our transcript, we didn’t have a grade that was for the entire year, the two semesters were completely separate so those are both seen by colleges and are factored into the gpa. It just depends on what the school puts on transcripts what people really care about grade wise</p>
<p>At the high schools in our area, the semesters are considered completely separate. Every course is a semester course. A full-year course is treated as a sequence of two semester courses (just as it would be in college). You don’t take Spanish 2. You take Spanish 2A in the fall and Spanish 2B in the spring. </p>
<p>In our system, the semester grades, which are the final grades, appear on the student’s transcripts. However, the three component grades that go into them (the two marking period grades and the final exam grade) do not. </p>
<p>This separate-semesters arrangement is taken seriously. Students are under no obligation to take the second semester of a two-semester sequence. One of my daughter’s friends took three and a half years of Spanish. She dropped Spanish after taking the first semester of level 4 and took a one-semester course in something else during the second semester of that school year.</p>
<p>An unfortunate consequence of the separate-semesters system is that it makes it harder for students to find teachers who know them well enough to write recommendations for college. Because the first and second semester courses are entirely separate, a student often has different teachers for each semester. It’s difficult for a teacher to get to know a student well enough in one semester to write a recommendation. My son found it necessary to get a recommendation from a teacher in whose course he had gotten Bs, simply because he was the only teacher that my son had had for both semesters of junior year.</p>
<p>Marian, I had never heard of a school like that. I’m still learning things on CC! At our HS almost all the classes are for a full year, except for some electives. The only time semester grades matter is that mid-year report senior year that colleges see.</p>
<p>Semester grades matter in that each quarter is 40% with the midterm/final being 20%. You can statistically get two low A’s the first two quarters, get a B on the midterm and no matter how high your grades are in either the 3rd/4th quarter or final it’s statistically impossible to get an A for the year as the two semesters are averaged not on 100 pt scale, but converted to a 4.0 scale. If you don’t get an A the first semester to get the 4.0 you can’t get an A for the year.</p>
<p>At our school students get half a credit for each semester even in a full semester class. Each quarter is worth 40% of the semester grade and the final exam is worth 20%. The school reports semester grades on the transcript.</p>