<p>Why don’t US high schools and universities give percentiles instead of the A,B,C,D,F grades, kind of like the SATs? The percentiles can then be weighted with class average and difficulty so courses with teachers who give out all A’s will be properly considered. It seems like a lot of students look for the “easy” classes to take to get easy A’s.</p>
<p>Percentile tells you where you are in standing in relation to a group. Majority of high schools already do percentiles of the whole. It is called class rank. Attempting it on the per class level and then trying to adjust to compare to the whole would create adjusting factors that are likely mind boggling. For example, suppose you have a math class with ten bright students, 9 of whom score perfectly on a test and one misses one question. That one is now at the 10 percentile level. What adjustment factors do you create to compare that with rest of the high school?</p>
<p>There is a philosophy in public education that says that the purpose of the school is to educate every child. The ideal is that all of the children would be successful.</p>
<p>Grading by percentiles is not compatible with this concept.</p>
<p>So I’m a good teacher say in something easy to grade like math. All my kids learn the material. They get 100s on all the tests. Don’t they all deserve As if they know the material for that level perfectly?</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, any class that is on a curve is graded exactly as you say, by percentile. The only reason this is bad though is because, for example, when I took organic chemistry there was a distinct advantage to taking it in the fall rather than the spring because then you avoid the pre-meds who ruin the curve. These kinds of things cause a lot of courses I’m taking to make it a strict no-curve grading scale, which still sucks because if they make a couple of hard tests they end up screwing everybody over.</p>
<p>There is no perfect system. If you grade by percentile then a person can do well on tests, but if everyone does better they suddenly are last in the class. If they grade without a curve then it gets more difficult to get a proper distribution and one bad test can ruin your grade for an entire semester.</p>
<p>My kids’ high school did grade by percentiles. They had a scale if one wanted to know what was an A, B, etc. as 94-100=A. But on report card and for class rank, percentiles were used.</p>
<p>At college though, all the schools used letter grades.</p>
<p>My daughter’s high school grades by percent, which is more specific than letter grades. A 91 is a 91, not an A, a 100 is a 100, etc. I think it’s a much better way of doing things.</p>
<p>I just wrote a post about this on another thread, our school uses percentages and the one problem is if you have many grades right on the borderline of the next letter grade you don’t any additional weight for that grade. The example I used was my daughter had 2 89’s and 2 88’s. So they all were converted to 3’s on the GPA scale instead of 4’s as 90 was the threshold. The difference between a 89 and a 90 could have been as simple as missing 2 points on a multiple choice question, yet the implications to the overall GPA are greater than that since on your GPA calculation you missed 4 points, maybe .25 on your overall.</p>
<p>I wish that there was a range that examiners looked at when kids score within a couple of points of the treshold both high and low, so a kid gets looked at as having a GPA in a range of 3-3.25 instead of 3.0 for example. I didn’t like the percentage based system after I understood how they get converted. I think teachers better internalize the implications of between and A and a B when kids are right on the fence. In a percentage based system it’s just a mark so what’s the difference.</p>
<p>My graduate school graded in tenths, the same way that people talk about their grades, 3.3, 2.4. 3.9. Best system ever.</p>
<p>No brutal cutoffs between 4.0 and 3.5 or 3.0.</p>
<p>I’ll enver understand why every school doesn’t do it that way. If you earned a 3.6, you got a 3.6, not a 4.0 or a 3.0.</p>
<p>Are you talking about percentiles or percentages? They are different. Percentiles let you know where you are in relation to others. Percentages tell you the %age you got correct. I can tell you that when we have used %iles with parents it has become VERY confusing because they think we are talking about %age. 50%ile is average. A 50%age grade is failing.</p>
<p>The OP asked about percentiles. Most posters are talking about percents. Drusba showed why percentiles would realy work against the kids in the very toughest, seminar type classes where most would be expected to get high grades. Once converted to percentiles, even an A student could drop to the 10th percentile. </p>
<p>I like percents with no conversion to letter grades.</p>
<p>Our district used a %age system and not letter grades. The unweighted grade is reported on the transcript while the weighted %age is used to calculate the class rank. </p>
<p>Our son’s final APCalcBC grade of 83 was mighty impressive. Actually he never had a term or final report card without at least one grade of less than 90 but that 83 was definitely the lowest.</p>
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<p>Not always…</p>
<p>Sometimes a less precise grading system is better. I dislike the thought of kids noting to the hundredth point who outranks whom, it is nicer to be general, as in an A student… This is from a person for whom fractions of numbers has been important (math-science-medicine). I also know of a set of gifted twins where their mother reported the girl would strive for (and get) the 100++ % whereas the boy would work for the minimum to get the A… We dealt with an A,B,C system with no grade weighting or modifiers. No system is perfect, letter grades allow for more intangibles. The subjective aspect of grading needing to be given precise points… I also dislike the %ile aspect of forever comparing people to each other, it gets done in enough ways without needing to always be aware of one’s standing.</p>