CAUTION: excruciatingly boring.

Quote Originally Posted by cilu
I'm not following...
The US school systems suffer from something called "grade inflation." It starts at elementary school and goes straight up through college. Grade inflation is simply the tendancy for instructors to give students a higher grade than they deserve. Here in California, schools that turn out students with good grades get more funding the next year, so there is an incentive (political pressure) to inflate the grades of students so that the school looks good. Its similar where ever you go in the US.

At the college level it is sometimes ridiculous, especially at state funded colleges. Grades go from A,B,C,D and F which stands for Fail. Technically, if you get a D and the course is required for you to graduate (its not an elective) most likely you will have to repeat it. So this narrows things down to just three grades, A,B & C really because if you fail a required class you are taking it over. It gets better, in graduate school there pretty much is only A and B. So when Tom jokes about all scores being A, he is not far off concerning some schools. Don't get me wrong though, there are a lot of great colleges in America that have tough standards and produce smart folks. Just look at our stunningly articulate president, he went to both Yale and Harvard.

Some colleges are pass/fail. No grades. There are very few of these. Evergreen College in Washington state is/was one of them. Bunch of hippies. I saw a Phish concert there. The body odor of the crowd could melt your face.

Also, everyone so far is wrong on grades here. Grades ultimately translate into the GPA, grade point average. An A is 4.0 points, B is 3.0, C is 2.0 and D is 1.0. So if you have a 3.5gpa then you are mostly getting A's and B's. It's subjective though. In the CompSci classes, plagarism of code is horribly rampant these days (actually, since the internet and cut an paste, a lot of studies are like this.) They give points ranging from 0-100 for tests and homework but for the total class you get a number between 0 and 4. This number is multiplied by the number of units the class is worth (usually 3 units) which is based on the difficulty compared to other classes at that level. More difficult classes are 4 or 5 units and usually include more class/lab time. Short classes might be one unit. So to figure out your GPA is a total pain.