Grading in the United States

Academic grading in the United States commonly takes on the form of five letter grades. Traditionally, the grades are A, B, C, D, and F — A being the highest and F, short for failed, the lowest. Numeric to letter grade conversions generally vary from system to system and between academic disciplines.

The typical grades awarded for participation in a course are (from highest to lowest) A, B, C, D, and F. Variations on the traditional five-grade system allow for awarding A+, A, & A- ; B+, B, & B-; C+, C, & C-; D+, D, & D-; and F. In primary and secondary schools, a D is usually the lowest passing grade, however, there are some schools that consider a C the lowest passing grade, so the general standard is that anything below a 60 or 70 is failing, depending on the grading scale. In college and universities, a D is considered to be an unsatisfactory passing grade. Students will usually still earn credit for the class if they get a D, but sometimes a C or better is required to count some major classes toward a degree, and sometimes a C or better is required to satisfy a prerequisite requirement for a class.

Below is the grading system found to be most commonly used in United States public high schools, according to the 2009 High School Transcript Study. This is the most used grading system, however, there are some schools that use an edited version of the college system.

Below is a grading system used by three different colleges in the United States. Other schools use different systems, so this is by no means universal.

Grading Scale: Number scores are eventually computed into percentages and the percentages into letter grades. The following scale is used to assign the actual letter grade: Percent

Grade 96 to 100% A 93 to 95% A- 90 to 92% B+ 87 to 89% B 84 to 86% B- 80 to 83% C+ 77 to 79% C 74 to 76% C- 71 to 73% D+ 67 to 70% D 64 to 66% D- Grading Policy - No grade below an “84%” is counted toward completion of a major or minor. Therefore we can say that an A* is equivalent to a 7+ and, an A is equivalent to a 7 e.t.c.

Most teachers construct an organized system for evaluating student work.

In a typical points-based system each question in every assignment is assigned a certain number of points. A simple homework question is usually worth five points and a lengthy project such as an essay is worth about 70 points. The points for a large project in turn may be further divided into smaller areas for evaluation (this is called a "rubric"): ten points for writing the correct length of an essay, five points for a well-written introduction, five points for spelling and grammar, ten points for reasoning, and so forth. The final grade for the course is calculated as a percentage of points earned out of points possible.

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