Whining
I got my grades today, and I am thrilled to report that I got straight A’s. I think the last time that happened was in 1992. So why, you might ask, am I whining?
Because there’s no standard as to whether professors award plus and/or minus grades. In two of my classes, there were no pluses or minuses. In another, there were pluses but not minuses. In yet another, there were traditional pluses and minuses, and in the last one, there were some pluses and some minuses, but no A pluses. HUH?!
In GPA calculations at CSU, pluses and minuses are taken into consideration (except A pluses). So, in theory, two students could take the exact same class from different professors and earn exactly the same numeric grade, but if one professor gave pluses and minuses and the other didn’t, one student would get more credit towards his/her GPA. How is that fair?
And, even without the GPA in consideration, don’t pluses and minuses provide a finer shade of meaning than a mere letter grade alone? Numerically, I actually earned A pluses in all my classes, but you wouldn’t know it from my transcript.
How is it fair that a student who earned a 92 in my statistics class gets an A, and a student (namely me) who earned 104.5 also gets an A? I worked my patooti off for those 12 and a half extra points. Does this mean I shouldn’t have bothered? Wah.
Like I said, I’m just whining. I don’t expect anybody to give a Rattus rattus derriere. But still.
Dec 23, 2008 | 2 | Non-Traditional Students
January 17th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
I don’t know how they calculate things at your school, but at mine we have no half-grades at all — there’s just A, B, C and F. BUT, when they calculate class rank, they use your numeric grades, not your letter grades. So two people could both have a 4.0, and one of them could be ranked #1 in the class, and the other could be #30. So I guess it works itself out that way.
January 29th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Yikes, I dunno which way is more confusing. I suppose whichever way they do it, somebody’s always gonna be unhappy. But thanks for listening to me whine.