Hello fellow Americans!
I’m wondering about American grades. I’ve heard that passing is around 90%, and you have grades from F to A. I’ve also heard that B is not passing. From where I’m from, (Sweden), E is passing (50-60% usually), and will get you through university without problems, when I get a B on my exams, everyone believes that is a really good grade, it is even named “Very good” as a grade officially. I don’t understand why there’s such a difference here. Do you always need to get 90% and A grades to pass in American schools? Why do people get disappointed at a B?
23 comments
9 times out of 10 if you see a character in media who is upset about getting a B, it’s to show how seriously they take their grades. Normal people aren’t going to be upset about getting a B.
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>>I’ve also heard that B is not passing
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>I’ve heard that passing is around 90%
Where did you hear this?
The only people who get disappointed in a B grade are people who always get an A. Also B is passing, and so is C.
Passing grades are most often at or above 70%. Some parents get disappointed with B’s (80-89%) because they know in their hearts that their kid is better than that.
B is good. A is better. We live in a competitive society, and lots of people strive to be the absolute best.
The question to me is how is 50 – 60% passing?
Holy shit, 50-60% is passing? I had some senior level engineering classes that graded on a curve like that but that’s about it.
A B is 80-89%, which is great and depending on the student is a perfectly fine score, however there are some people who are extremely academically focused and strive to have the highest grade possible. It’s no different than an athlete wanting to be the best player on the team.
Because if you get a B that means you actually tried and didn’t get the top grade.
People want to see GPA when hiring or when applying for college. Terrible thing is one, just one D or F in a class can dump the entire GPA down and it will never recover. I was an A/B student in college, got one F in Geology (I hated the class but I worked my ass off and still failed), and all of a sudden my GPA was 2.4 despite all As and Bs in everything else. I wasn’t able to recover it. I had two semesters of straight A’s later on and only managed to get it back up to 2.9GPA.
This meant I was not considered viable for a lot of jobs because it LOOKED like I was a C+ student. I had to send my college transcripts in with a few jobs to show I was honestly a great student, I just failed one class my Freshman year.
Shit, students like me were happy with any passing grade lol, which in high school was anything that wasn’t an F.
In college however, I straightened up. If I got below a B I was pretty pisssed off and really tried to improve on it.
Exactly zero people have ever asked me what my GPA was after graduation
B grades can also have a real impact on your life. If you’re trying to get into certain schools, having a few Bs (as your final grade to the class) can knock you out of the competition. If you have an academic scholarship, your free tuition often depends on getting certain grades. My first few years of college I was on full tuition scholarships, but I could only afford to get one B a semester (out of 5-6 classes) or I would drop down to only getting half my tuition paid for.
for me, i don’t get upset at B’s, but i’ll be pretty disappointed if my final grade is a B because i’ve been a straight A student since i was 5
A passing grade can be anything over an F or D, depending on if it’s highschool or college.
Why are olympians upset when they win silver? Same thing. You were confident in your abilities but came up just short. Yes still good and definitely acceptable to most, but just a little short from perfect.
Grade inflation is pretty real
I’d say a B was average for me along with an A but I never minded if I got C’s or Ds in classes I didn’t particularly like.
Now, that said, I do have a friend who took her grades VERY seriously. Not because of her parents just because to her, anything below a 95 (A range) was disappointing and a failure. I had a few classmates like that too and honestly, at the time I didn’t know if I wanted to call them stupid or pity them.
For reference, an actual fail in my school was a 65% or below.
I don’t remember exactly what my step brother went to college for, I think it was some management thing degree of something, but the common refrain of his coursework was, “D equals degree!”
So, it probably just depends
It depends on whether it is high school, undergraduate, or graduate.
If I recall, a D and above was a pass in high school. If the class was a prerequisite for the next class, you had to have a C or higher.
A C and above in undergraduate was passing.
And a B in graduate school. If anyone achieved more than two Cs in grad school they were dropped from the program.
We are very competitive. I wanted straight As in grad school because the competition with my classmates led me to studying more. It also helped me learn something I used throughout my career.
College admissions are competitive and a lot of people have high GPAs
Let’s talk about Grade Inflation.
Way back when these things were being decided (1950s?) the system was based on a C being the average grade. Given a normal distribution, you would expect about as many Ds as Bs, and As as Fs (Failure).
You would expect to graduate with around a C average, maybe a little more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_States
So you can literally half ass university and get 55% on everything and graduate? That’s wild
Not college, but there are certain career fields in the US military that require a 90% on each end of course exam to pass. Anything else would be failing and failing twice means either a)going into a nee career field or b)getting kicked out.
My career field in the Air Force was not that strict on testing but you still needed a 70% at the end of each course to pass. And failing twice meant going into another career field. I failed once (got a 65%) and was given a second chance and then almost failed later on but got a 70%. I will forever thank my instructor who saw my test sheet and said “lets talk about question 50.” A changed my answer from incorrect to correct and got a 70% on the test.
I was always happy when I got a B. I’m was a smart student, but never really tried. I never tried to get A’s, so if I got a B, I was happy. Most of my friends were in the same boat as well.
A “B” is quite good. Usually a “B” means between 80-89%. Some parents are very strict and get annoyed at their children if they don’t get an “A” though, which I think is excessive and too strict. To pass a class, you usually need at least a 60% (or 70% to take the follow-up class, if the current class is a pre-requisite for another class), although in college (university) some professors *may* curve a bit and so the passing grade might be lower – it might mention the grade percentages on the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, but not necessarily.