How bad is grade inflation in America? You always hear about

The latter

>>8742493
Pretty sure the grade inflation is pretty big, plus they probably have good professors and standarised tests.

In my country at the top Uni for STE(without M), there maybe 1-2 people in class every year that scrape between 85-90%. Everyone else is 50-75%.

I dont think there EVER was anyone that got 4.0.

Pretty jelly of American education anyway. Feelsbadman.

For reference in this post: I'm study at a Dutch university.

From my conversations with friends that did a semester abroad and my conversations with a few people online I mostly gathered that American and Canadian education tends to have a somewhat higher workload (e.g more papers to write, more mandatory attendance).
However, with exception of perhaps the top tier universities, the curriculum itself is easier.

Part of the problem is that American high schools are standardized, and that the first year of university (also filled with general courses) is spent catching up.

In NL students are pre-sorted in high school and get more advanced courses aimed at scientific thought. Once you get to university, there are barely any courses you have to do outside of your major. One exception is that there's a scientific writing course, which most majors worth their salt get.

Lastly, I happen to know that an 8.0/10 to 8.5/10 (depends on what insititute you ask) would be converted to an A when applying to universities abroad.


It's a whole lot of anecdotal evidence, but I've heard it resonates with a lot of people.

>>8742493
>Either Americans are all geniuses, or they have a very easy curriculum.
or shit is scaled differently, faggot.

>>8742493
Having a 4.0 in high school is common because its not that hard and schools usually run on a system where they don't do it by % but instead by letters (so a 94 is a 4.0 rather than a 3.76, but a 93 is a 3.7). Having a 4.0 in college isn't common unless you are at a degree mill.

>>8742565
No shit retard that's the whole point of the thread

>american reading comprehension

A 4.0 GPA is not common among University students outside of business majors. Classes are usually curved to a 70-75% average though.

I think like 2 kid in my 200 class of sophomores in my major have a 4.0. Getting all A/A- is very possible, getting all A without a single A- is insane.

>>8742493
Everybody with a 4.0GPA also has 185 IQ and a 10 inch penis. 4.0s are not nearly as common as the Internet would like you to believe.

Although US curriculums tend to be lower-level than European, the curriculum itself also does not have much to do with the average; you could write a completely impossible high school algebra test just as easily as you could make a differential geometry test that everybody in the class gets a 90 on.

There is a cultural difference between U.S. testing and European, I think. European tests are what are harder, not the courses. U.S. tests very rarely contain "challenge-style" problems, things that require sly tricks you weren't shown, or really anything that's drastically different that what was done in classes and homeworks. Tests here are meant to see if you understood the class, and if you understood 100% of the class you should get 100%.

Your grades are a function of how many difficult classes you take. Your university organizes classes in terms of number of units (itself a function of hours you're expected to study for the course), but as we all know by now, units for a liberal arts class are not the same as units for a STEM class.
Not only that, the quality of a university can vary significantly. Schools with reputation don't need your money--they get plenty from government contracts. This means that they are able to teach courses at a level they deem appropriate, and distribute grades at a level they deem appropriate.

But you're making a common mistake here. Grades are not supposed to be an interpretation of your ranking amongst your fellow students (as some professors grade), they are supposed to be an interpretation of your understanding of the material.
A lower level university would plainly provide a lower level understanding of the material.

tl;dr the subject is complicated and you're over-simplifying it.

>>8742493
>Chinks get high test scores/grades
>such skill! much intelligence!
>Americans do the same
>muh grade inflation! muh watered down material!

>>8742834
>they are supposed to be an interpretation of your understanding of the material.
this so much.

People seem to forget that the IDEAL CASE would be everyone getting a 4.0 GPA because everyone understood the material.
Of course teaching methods aren't perfect, some people is smarter than others and a myriad of real life factors can affect your grades too so it's never going to be the case, but as the best teacher I ever had said: "it's easy to teach to the gifted, they learn quicky and almost on their own. But a good teacher should be able to make even the dumbest ones understand".

>>8742843
the problem comes when niggers start to get As. Chinks have their 109 average IQ backing them.

>>8742865
niggers don't go to college.

>>8742826
>Tests here are meant to see if you understood the class, and if you understood 100% of the class you should get 100%.

Holy shit, no wonder the 4.0 grades. This is nothing like Europe.

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>>8742493
>come from country with no GPA
>interviewer asks for GPA

>>8742834
>>8742860
>they are supposed to be an interpretation of your understanding of the material.
>A lower level university would plainly provide a lower level understanding of the material.
>People seem to forget that the IDEAL CASE would be everyone getting a 4.0 GPA because everyone understood the material.
that's if every course and every exam were the same
a 4 means jack if the material was never challenging enough

>but as we all know by now, units for a liberal arts class are not the same as units for a STEM class.
sorry, not in the loop, explain this to me

People score higher in my upper level math courses because the memers failled out of calc and no engineers.

>>8742560
>Lastly, I happen to know that an 8.0/10 to 8.5/10 (depends on what insititute you ask) would be converted to an A when applying to universities abroad.

Well that's good news for me at least, fellow Dutchfriend. What university do you go to?

>>8742493
>How bad is grade inflation in America?
Atrocious. There's zero standardization whatsoever here and grades are handed out basically at the professor's whim. A lot of 4.0 students manage it partially by enrolling with easier professors.

>>8744018
I just put self-calculated GPA usually

A friend of mine spent a year at some state university in the US, his GPA for this year was about 3.7 although he said he was often ashamed for handing his ridiculously bad homework.
His current grade at home is equivilant to a B-, our exams average is usually C- to D, with only 2-4% A or A-. (D is passing grade, usually at 40% of the total score)
Literally nobody graduates with an A, and usually all our (bachelor and masters) majors require a thesis.

>>8742493
>A typical university class has an average in the 50-70% range, which would be considered failing by American standards. Either Americans are all geniuses, or they have a very easy curriculum.
Thought about that too. At my uni only the top students get 50-70%. People even joke about 50% = 100%.
We are either all brainlets or americans are really smar.

Wait a second, people at MIT and harvard are getting 90 % or more on tests? This is what all the americans on here get? Is the picutre in the OP real?

I hated my degree and got 60 something percent. This is seen as completely acceptable in the UK!

>>8744266
>All
No, not ALL. Grade inflation is definitely a thing, but only at larger universities (Take, Harvard, MIT).

At smaller/medium unis it's larger just a method that tops off existing acceptable students as the shitty ones just drop or change majors.

Additionally, that image takes non-STEM, which is known to be trash, into account.

>>8744272
>Take
Yale*

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>>8742872
>niggers don't go to college

>>8742876
This.

You should be maybe upper quartile at most for simply understanding the material, applying it to new situations and combining it with knowledge from other courses should be required to get a 4.0

>>8744247
Why would employers want to hire anyone with a 0.0 gpa though?

>>8744365
I suppose that our grade system would be adjusted so anyone who got 50-60% wouldn't get a 0 GPA.

>>8744365
>Why would employers want to hire anyone with a 0.0 gpa though?
because the applicant's wealthy Chinese uncle is looking to buy real estate.

>>8744302
Why tho?

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>>8742493
feels good living in Canada

>>8744458
Are you shitting me with this...

>>8744458
Fucking hell, I could fail one of my class3s and sti get 4.0

When it comes to STEM, MIT seems to be the reference in the USA. They have a bunch of open courses in ocw.mit.edu, you can go check their syllabus and exams. I found the MIT equivalent courses to those I took at my university (which is far from MIT when it comes to excellence) to be much easier. They have a shitload of coursework which basically consists of periodically solving problems or other related activities that are highly encouraged to be done in groups and they are all taken into account during grading, they even consider class participation in it, it's not just the exams scores, that only plays a small part in it. And their exams aren't (at least the ones I checked) all that either, I recall having much harder exams at my local institution. I suppose that would be reasonable considering their workload but the thing is it didn't seem to be that much different from most institutions from what I've seen. Grades can easily be inflated in America. And don't get me started on class average grading, if the entire class fails, say, 80% of the exam you can still score an A in it.

>>8744451
So you don't reward mediocre tryhards

In the real world you will need to do more than that, menial calculations can be done by some pajeet. A good University education should prepare you for academia (if you're doing science or maths), give you the ability to do actual research and allow you to use what you have learned on more than just an artificially simply problem sheet

>>8744480
>>8744466
this all applies to every province in Canada btw

>>8742493
In many courses attendance and homework counts directly towards your grade, ~25% of it.

Given that, it is literally impossible to get <25% in this courses.

>take accurate and easily understandable number
>convert it to less accurate number
>convert that number to a letter

Americans.

>>8744523
the GPA scale drives me up the fucking wall. A 79 is 3.3, while an 80 is 3.7? Fuck that noise, how about you just look at my raw percentage. I don't need a single mark under 80 to fuck me up that much.

>>8744531
>I don't need a single mark under 80 to fuck me up that much.

I don't need a single percent to fuck me up that much**

I knew three undergrads at my university who has a 4.0 GPA (I had 3.9), but we were all honors math majors and realistically some of the best students on the campus (state school). It's pretty rare to have a 4.0 in anything past a semi-technical degree in college.

>letter grade
Why the fuck this piece of shit exists?

>>8742493
Australian University Grading system:
40-49 = Fail
50-64 = Pass
65-74 = Credit
75-84 = Distinction
85-100 = High Distinction

Credits and Distinctions are common. High distinctions require decent study usually (at least in my case). From what I've seen, content for my course is pretty much the same.

>>8742536
>Pretty sure the grade inflation is pretty big,
Yes.
>plus they probably have good professors
No. That's why the grades get inflated.
>and standarised tests.
Everyone in the class gets the same test, but different classes with different teachers on the same subject often get different tests, and what each teacher actually talks about in the class can be very different.

>>8742493
Not sure how accurate this is from a US standpoint but it seems to checkout with my experience of an Australian University but I found it interesting anyway.
link:http://collections.uiowa.edu/web-images/internationalPrograms/ofsa/376/preparation/australianacademics.pdf
Basically gives a comparison between US and Australian universities.

>>8744272
>MIT
>grade inflation
LOL

I saw a chart from my (dutch) uni that said a united states A is 7.5/10 and up. If you can manage that consistently it's pretty good but it's really nothing extraordinary.

>>8742595
>Having a 4.0 in high school is common
also because ap classes are out of 5.0, so you can get a b and still have a 4.0 overall.

similarly in college there's straight gpa vs weighted gpa.

The only university degrees that are still being strict in grading are in STEM, and that's why it's the last vestige of respect in our system

>tfw go to cornell
>one of the only top schools with grade DEflation
Fuck me I guess.

>>8744637
so a 7.5/10 on a dutch test means you have the knowledge to get a 9/10 on an american test?

Grades in Europe

1 Pretty bad, but you passed the exam with 50% score
2 Meh
3 At least you tried
4 Fretty good
5 Fantastic!

Grades in USA f* yea!

A Meh
B What heppened to you?
C Pretty bad
D Consider changing your major
E Consider drop out
F Consider suicide

>>8744657
>E
atleastyoutried.jpg

>>8742493
tfw you have 50-75% in almost all courses in your B.Sc. and when you convert the grades to GPA is 3.1

>tfw STEM student in the US, every grade received has been between B- and A+
>GPA: 3.48

kms desusenpaifam

I think it's hilarious that Europeans think that their classes being unnecessarily difficult means they are better. I wonder why American universities on average hold much more prestige internationally and a substantial portion are consistently ranked in the top 100 universities in the world.

Almost all new medical innovation comes from the US and the largest tech companies in the world are all American. Makes you wonder what Europeans are doing so wrong.

>>8744772
>medical innovation comes from the country that sells healthcare as a product
Gee I wonder why

>>8744772
>unnecessarily difficult

its not difficulty. its the fact that their professors don't give a fuck about them. thats what happens when literally everyone gets to go to college for free. one-shot finals and rote lectures are draconian teaching methods, but euro's pride themselves on it and deride actual teaching as "hand-holding"

>>8744626
MIT used a 5 point scale for all classes and doesn't count the first semester of freshman year, so it is very inflated.

>>8744466
>>8744480
It's to balance out the grade inflation in the US

>>8744581
So you get 40 points for free or what?

>>8744657
Where do you live that all grades are passing grades?

>>8744807
>He depends on his proffessors
Brainlets everyone

>>8744807
You would be more credible if you stopped talking out of your ass

>>8744772
>private universities charging 60k a year are better than public unis

Oh, what a surprise!

Also consider that in many European countries research is done at research centres and not at universities (at least not to the same extend), which is why european unis lose out on the research marks in the rankings

Also European Unis usually aren't very selective with admissions and just kick people out later

And then obviously it's also a matter of the average. Sure, the US has more top level schools than Europe, but if you compared the average ones the result would likely be different

>>8744876
What's the point in having non-passing grades? A fail is a fail

>>8744458

You guys have it easy:
A 92-100
B 77-91
C 58 -76
D 46-57
E 40-45
Notice how your A isnt even an A in Norway.
University of Oslo btw

>>8742493
In my experience its not very real. Maybe in other institutions its more common but in an intro bio course i took the prof posted the histograms and class average was 50-60%

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>>8742539
>American """education"""

>>8745259
Same here at NTNU, the first As I got felt really good, Getting only As is unheard of.

>>8744118
VU University.

My course was only offered there or Leiden. I already live in Amsterdam, so the choice was fairly easy.

>>8745259
Is E still passing, or why does it end at 40?

>>8745282
Hva studerer du?

>>8745284
Yeah E is still passing.

https://www.uio.no/studier/eksamen/karakterskala/fagspesifikk-karakterbeskrivelse/mn-math.html#skriftlig

>>8745289
banned

In UK

A - 70%
B - 60%
C - 50%

At most universities about 15% of the class average over 70% overall.

>>8745289
data, tar phd nå

>>8742493
So based on the fact that people in your country are given passing grades with a 50%, you've concluded that *our* schools must be easy? Interesting.

>>8744876
0 =Fail

>>8744492
Albertans get a 5-10% bonus when applying to out of province Canadian universities due to their harder curriculum

get on the french level faggots

>>8745539
wait really? thats great since it's not even hard here

>>8745539
fucking socialists

>>8745571
alberta is the texas of Canada... we are the most anti commie province (mainly because every province loves to suck out our money)

>>8742539
Interesting how the boomers caused massive inflation in the late 60s and early 70s. I'm not quite sure what caused the later rise in grades though. Millennials?

>>8745569
I think it has to do with the heavy weighting on the diploma exam

I remember when I was in highschool(2009) it was worth 50% of your total mark and most people fucked it up, dropping their mark considerably, they've since changed it to only 30%

So lets get this straight, classes should be so difficult that it's almost impossible for someone who applies themselves within reason to understand 90% of the content taught in the class? If the average is 60% that means the level of education is higher? Only understanding barely over half the material is preferable to a sizable chunk of the class understanding all of it? Not sure what exactly our European friends are proposing here. To me if nobody, or a tiny percentage, of a class is able to achieve an A either the class was taught very poorly so the information was inaccessible to the students, the demands were unrealistic, or the testing was not consistent with what was being taught.

>>8745614
>let's teach everyone to count again so 100% of the class understands everything fully

>>8742493
I came from a different country. While Americans were learning pre-calculus in college, literally every single student in my country learned it at around 8th grade. I was surprised at how shit the education system was when people had a choice to not take fucking math or science classes.

Anyways, I was a B student, and all our exams/tests had extremely lengthy/difficult questions, whereas in the US it was multiple choice questions, which just made me fucking lol.

>>8745259
>B 77 - 91
lol american education xD

>>8745625
>let's teach something nobody in the class will understand so people know the school is good since nobody passes

Or, instead of making a retarded hyperbole

-this is the class you are teaching
-this is how your students knowledge of your material will be evaluated
-your job is to make sure every student understands
-understandably some students will not apply themselves or not me mentally up to the challenge, so we will have a grading system rather than pass/fail
-if nobody in the class can demonstrate they understand at least 90% of the material either you failed to teach them properly or entry into the class needs to be evaluated, perhaps adding a prerequisite course

Pretty simple. If there is a course in any school where nobody gets an A and the average in 55% then it's just a waste of time. This false equivalency where nobody doing well means the school must be good is completely ridiculous.

>>8745614
This poster just BTFO out of EU students. It really doesn't make sense how they're proud of a 60% in a course. Quite sad.

It's okay though. That's why a majority of them try to come to school over here.

The only people I know who actually want to study at a uni in EU are sorority girls looking for a semester abroad

Kek

>>8742493
Grade inflation is common in top ten universities, and ironically, the opposite is common in state schools in USA. Professors in Average Unranked State U will purposely deflate the grade average to make the program seem harder than it is, or the the department will turn a relatively easy class like calc 2 into a death trap so they can weed out the weaker students with like a 30-40% pass rate. It's dumb and fucks both the especially gifted and average student over in that 1) an A from a top ten is literally meaningless and 2) Joe six pack who worked his butt off to get his EE degree from Kansas state with a 2.9 now has two things stacked against him - his alma mater and his GPA.

>>8745656
Russian ?

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>average GPA increases to 3.0
>employers, grad schools increase their requirements to match
>butthurt yuropeans with 2.0 equivalent GPAs complain because they got rejected from an American graduate school program

Really assimilates my axons.

>>8746043
Pakistan

>>8744652
Cornell graduates get a lot of respect, though. I graduated with a 2.7 and still managed to get into a top 10 grad program in my field. There were a lot of Cornellians already in the program, too. Hold your head up high.

>>8746134
>every student in my country
>literally thousands of children unable to go to school in Pakistan because of how awful your people are
>no real standardized education

Lol ok

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>>8746134

>>8746188
You're really stupid. Every student =/= every kid.

And I'm happy at least I'm not doing fucking 8th grade math in college like your whole country

>>8745325
seriously? i could literally not bother studying and straight out get an A if i was in UK

>>8746201
American here
we really do have universities clogged with millions of brainlets.

We literally teach them how to add fractions. In a university.

>how to add fractions
>in a university

fuckfuckfuck

>>8746185
Cornell is godly 2bh my family

>>8742493
That scale is incorrect for US, anything above 90% is a 4.0 GPA.

>>8746212
this is the entire reason other countries think they're smarter than Americans.

It's easier to get good grades in their brainlet countries. You can get an 83% and be the king of the retards

>>8742493
First off
It really depends

>High school
Europe beats us
>College
American wins

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2017/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats


Only Oxford holds the "best university in the world" with everything else heavily dominated by american universities

And with brexit It might change up abit

Also not listed, Japan for robotics(obvious reason) being in front behind americans

>>8746216
you're probably teaching at some rural area university made for brainlets

>>8746224
Even at Cornell there was a class to teach algebra. I accidentally sat through half of a recitation section while looking for my calculus class. Granted, like half the students seemed non-traditional, but still: ALGEBRA.

>>8745675
>University of Oslo
>American

>>8746201
Nigga, you're the stupid one. You claim every "student" in Pakistan is doing pre-calculus in 8th grade, but that's obviously a lie, because the huge majority of Pakistani students will never finish secondary school, learn to read above a primary school level, and only 6% will complete university. We're talking about a country with "compulsory" education, but literacy rates under 30% in some areas. A huge percentage of schools in Pakistan teach creationism as absolute truth, and can barely afford copies of the Koran to distribute, let alone pre-calculus text books.

You may have been doing pre-calculus in 8th grade (it's not that astonishing of feat), but the majority of Pakistani students are not. Ignorant of your own country. Unfortunate

>>8746319
Everyone in my country does the same syllabus up to the 8th grade. Even afterwards, math is mandatory till the 12th grade, and everyone who takes it takes the same courses as everyone else. I.e. there is no allowing some people to take algebra in 8th grade and others in 12th.

Dunno what you're so butthurt about, you're probably just a pajeet

>>8746230
Its definitely the farmer kids because CALS has a boner for farmer kids

Haven't heard much about the educational system in Pakistan, let's take a look

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1106840/pakistan-worlds-weakest-higher-education-system-say-qs-rankings/

Pakistan has the world’s weakest higher education system while US and UK have the strongest.

Pakistan has been ranked 50, with an overall score of 9.2 by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a British ranking agency. Despite the government’s claims to have invested billions in the country’s education system, Pakistan secured the lowest ranking of the fifty countries included in the list.
That's just for higher education, let's check overall education index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index
In 2013 Pakistan is 6th from the bottom, just behind Sierra Leone, Mali, and Sudan, only very slightly ahead of 5 other African countries

>>8746336
23% of Pakistanis still shit in the open, my man.

>>8746336
Typical delusional mena inhabitant

>>8742493
4.0 EE/philosophy student here. I almost never go to class, and skip as much homework as I'm able.

I just prefer naps to class.

>>8746409
Kinda makes me ashamed of the American education, but they keep throwing scholarship money at me so I keep on going.

>>8746387
you'd shit out in the open too if the only bathrooms were public and using them would cause you to get dysentery

>>8746414
Because getting dysentery from your water supply is a better alternative

>>8744648
>ap classes are out of 5.0
Not at every school. Some do that, some make them the same, some make other levels above it.

>tfw class valedictorian took easy classes and my dual enrollment counted against me

>>8742493
I don't know. The grade inflation made me lazy in a few classes, and fucked up my priorities. But I did find my self able to out do my peers.

>>8744458
HA next time I post on /pol/ I will use this to make the Burger Education look good.

>>8742493
>How bad is grade inflation
It is so bad that 'Murikans head a list of percents as "percentage".

>>8745957
>>8745988

Department president told us that if majority of students has an A then the class was too easy so they up the curriculum difficulty.

They actually push the students. At least in my Uni.

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>be me
>USA USA USA
>bs in math
>ms in math
>see my countrymen on /sci/ are brainlets
>embarrassed.png

>>8742826
>U.S. tests very rarely contain "challenge-style" problems, things that require sly tricks you weren't shown, or really anything that's drastically different that what was done in classes and homeworks.
All my upper division/graduate courses had brutal exams that required you to know some trick/weird algebraic manipulation if you wanted to solve the problem. Many of these tricks were not shown in class.

>>8744506
>In many courses attendance and homework counts directly towards your grade, ~25% of it.
Never had an upper division/graduate course where attendance or homework counted towards my grade. All course grades were based on exams or projects requiring a lengthy report.

>>8745614
>So lets get this straight, classes should be so difficult that it's almost impossible for someone who applies themselves within reason to understand 90% of the content taught in the class?
Just because you claim to understand the material, does not mean that you really understand the material. If you can only regurgitate what was covered in the lecture or textbook, then you truly do not understand the material. Whatever your goals are after school, you will need to work in situations that will require you solve problems that you have likely never seen before and develop a strategy to solve it based on your knowledge of the material. The final exams for one my favorite professors was 60% open problems and 40% problems similar to the material but presented in a different manner. Solve an open problem and you'll get an automatic A, your overall grade in the course did not matter. Several people, myself included, have solved one of the open problems, and got a publication from it.

>>8746216
>we really do have universities clogged with millions of brainlets.
Blame idiots for pushing the "you have to go to college or you will fail at life" meme.

>>8747120
The final exams for one my favorite professors was 60% open problems and 40% problems

I should add that courses were curved in the end. I forgot that part.

>>8747120
What university was that anon? What course and what kind of open problems?

Also how the fuck did you solve an open problem in the 3-4 hours of exam that they gave you?

>>8747120
>Whatever your goals are after school, you will need to work in situations that will require you solve problems that you have likely never seen before and develop a strategy to solve it based on your knowledge of the material.
Actually, the vast majority of real jobs require only regurgitating the same material you have already seen, and most in fact actively discourage doing anything else

>>8744036
>tfw engineer at applied math major and dropping Cs like a motherfucker

who is laughing now?

>>8742493
It's grade inflation, I went to Georgia Tech and most classes would grade easily or provide ways to push grades up.
I took numerical class and most the class got awful scores on every test, and the tests weren't even hard. So teacher just kept making tests easier and gave extra credit type things. These are people majoring in math??
In CS you can pick curriculum so lots of people pick the ez mode ones.
The honors threshold is below average gpa!

Also lots of students who try and game it by picking "easy" professors which is stupid since they're STEM majors trying to duck out on calc 3.
Over all there's lots of mediocre people who still get "good" grades and the good people just do lots of extra stuff like research, grad classes, etc.

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>>8747120
>The final exams for one my favorite professors was 60% open problems and 40% problems similar to the material but presented in a different manner
sure they were pal

These millennial SHITS think they deserve an A because they really need it on their resume to work at Peets Coffee when they finish their now meaningless degree. Let me tell you something you little fucks. Back when I was getting my masters in Math not a SINGLE test question was covered in the course. We had ONE TEST, with TEN PROBLEMS, each counted for 10% of our grade. The problems were the 7 Millennium Prize problems, and one problem each concerning organic chemistry, astrophysics, and game theory. Not a single person answered a question correctly and it was not curved, the entire class failed. And THAT is how we knew we were at the best University in the world. If a single person in any class is able to get an A then you have major problems, they are just having their hand held.

>>8747811
lmao.

I hate the whole "I had a shitty education and I knew it was shitty but that's the way it WAS done so that's going to be the way it IS done when I teach you." meme

>>8747811
So intentionally making the class impossible to pass and wasting your money is learning?

That is worse than inflating every ones grade 10% just for showing up and then rounding the grades nearest to the next grade level and lowering the D and C range by 5-10%.

You have to remember that your playing a game with the college, they will try there hardest to rip you off or trick you into taking more classes than you need.

Guys this is not hard.

In the US a 90 is equivalent to a UK 70. It's treated by employers and grad schools the same. It's not easier one way or another. Just a different grading scale--that's the extent of it.

Honestly.

>>8744652
Uchicago here

Hang in there bro

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>>8742872
>never gone to a basketball game

>>8745583
>what caused the later rise in grades
rich alumni dads sending scions to alma mater,
just like in the Sixties and Seventies

>>8744490
You clearly haven't had to hold a job in the real world. Unless you go into research explicitly even r&d jobs barely require anything more than addition

>>8742493
I'm in the college of science at Purdue (a school known for having no grade inflation). To graduate in the top 10% of the college this year, you need a 3.87 and it's similar for previous years.

>>8742493
I'm not sure if we're at fault here for having higher test and grade point averages. Like you do realize that 50-75% is earning half to three-forths of the maximum score. That's pathetic, quite honestly. Let me propose some other causes that could be a factor

>good teachers here, shit teachers in your dirt country
>good test standardization with actual course material here, shitty test production on the teacher's part in your dirt country
>higher intellect, intelligent hardiness, reasoning ability, memory capability, and bigger penis size here, none of the above there (by the way, you might get higher test scores if you don't always put down "none of the above" on your tests)
>actual methods to maintain good study habits here, hunting for dirt in your dirt country

There's a variety of reasons.

>>8742539
that's honestly goddamn bullshit. you don't deserve a degree if you relied on curves and ludicrous amounts of extra credit to get that A. Fuck you.

>>8742493
For the idiots saying the scaling is different, its not. The school determines what is failing and what is not. At my highschool, anything lower than a 70% was failing. For many other high schools, the cutoff was 60%. This is going to push individuals to maintain higher passing grades. If your school only requires you to know literally half the material, what's the point in attending half of your classes.

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>>8749308
>Some schools that were relatively immune to grade inflation in the 1990s, such as University of Nebraska-Kearney and Purdue, have experienced significant consumer-era inflation in the 2000s.

>>8749382
I rely on curves and ludicrous amounts of extra credit to get a B

Nobody's talked about Advanced Placement courses or I.B. courses for highschool GPA bumps

>>8749405
literally no one cares about your high school GPA, between AP and honors credits depending on how shit your school is you can get anywhere from like a 4.5 to a fucking 8.0, its not really your fault if you go to a shit school with 3 AP classes instead of one with a fully inflated schedule and under no circumstances is a sub 4.0 high school GPA acceptable

>>8749417
Literally what the fuck are you talking about, ate your talking about an American high school? Because a 4.5 is pretty much impossible, let alone anything higher. How the fuck are your shits graded? That doesn't even make sense. Like college, the max is generally 4.0, except since it's based on numbers instead of letter grades, you could technically get above 100 in some class diee to extra credit.

>>8749417
OP didn't specify Uni or Highschool. If its just uni that we're addressing then the problem is so minute, this shouldn't even be a thread. Nobody gets 4.0s in american college unless you're rainman counting toothpicks that fall on the floor or some shit

>>8749436
but that depends on your highschool dude, i graduated with a 4.9, at my school you could theoretically get up to a 5.0 but some schools in the district had some fucktarded system with like +4 difficulty points for AP where kids were graduating with an 8.0, its not like college you are stuck where you live so if you are at some podunk shithole with just a few AP classes and cant get above a 4.3-4.5 its not really your fault but almost every school lets you get above 4.0, universities do not

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I mean it depends a lot. I'm at a top 5 electrical engineering school in the US and this is the enforced grading curriculum on all of our classes

I think a lot of this comes down to Europeans hearing mixed anecdotes from many people who probably aren't even in STEM and thinking it's true for everyone. The only school that I know of that engages in chronic grade inflation and is also elite is Stanford, but they don't seem to have any issue in churning out plenty capable graduates. Berkeley, MIT etc. all have "harsh" grading standards.

>>8749468
Is it Caltech, though?
Seeing how many people graduate with >3.5 GPAs in America makes this distribution very hard to believe.

>>8749612
look, you gotta account for sampling bias, the only people talking about their grades on the internet are nerds who care more and tend to have higher GPAs, i graduated with a 3.6 and felt bad about it because my other nerd friends did as well or better but talking to my other friends a surprising amount of them graduate with a 2.0-3.0 GPA and still get degrees and jobs

>be me in a graduate course called system modelling and analysis where they taught convex optimization, linear programming and petri nets
>day before first test, professor starts to teach about linear programming without ever talking about it before
>says it's gonna be 30% for an exercise about that and 70% for convex optimization
>grades between 0% (yes, 0) and 65%, manages to get 52% somehow
>class after grades the prof calls us brainlets and retarded because it was supposed to be easy to get 80%
>tfw he solves the test and makes mistakes in every exercise and almost every step

>be in final exam
>linear programming exercise hard as fuck, nobody knew how to solve it correctly
>talk to one of the two professors of the course
>tells me that he made a bet with the other professor that nobody would answer that question
>some student has 50% in that specific question
>he gets mad af
>tfw he is my advisor master's thesis

>>8749904
Sweet Jesus anon, good luck with your master's. When my proffessors rightly call us brainlets, at least they're really fucking good at what they do (except for the usual silly blackboard mistakes).

>>8749929
Thankfully I passed the course (somehow) and only need to do my thesis (which I'm currently doing) but this course has 150+ students per year, only pass 20-30, every year there is anonymous suggestions to improve the course and he tells us that we are the problem since we are brainlets and don't study
gotta love them

>>8745988
>That's why a majority of them try to come to school over here.
[citation needed]

>>8746015
Weed out courses in my school:
>Calc I for STE, Calc II for M
>Organic Chem I + Biochem for bio majors and Pre-med/vet/dental
>Human Anatomy & Physiology for pre-nursing

>>8750001
Well I guess calc II is weed-out for EM rather than just M.

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Here's my Australian perspective.

Everything above 80% is the highest grade.
Though how easy it is to get above 80% is up to the individual lecturer/unit coordinator.

Also, this uni does GPA out of 7.
Where getting HD in all units gives 7, and getting passes in all units gives 4.
Failing a unit results in 0 GPA credit, and so it hits your GPA really hard.

I don't get why GPA is the common way to judge academic performance and not average mark.

>>8750001
>tfw shitty state school
>the majority of students fail calc 1 not once but twice

>>8742493
>I'm not paying for 2.0 GPA, and if I can't get it here I'll pay for school where I get easy 4.0
so you lower the requirements or else somebody will and will get your money. That;s why "socialists" European unis are superior, they actually care for education, not just profits and try to actually teach the kids, and not sell diplomas to the brainlets

>>8742493
>A typical university class has an average in the 50-70% range, which would be considered failing by American standards
can you get a passing grade when you score less than 50%? Where do you study?

Grade inflation isn't good, but let's not pretend that lower averages = better education.

>>8742826
>require sly tricks
i went to a german high school and noticed this in the math tests.
why do they do this and how can you prepare?

>>8750465
I don't think anybody is pretending that.

But lower averages = harder exams.

More questions that require critical thinking, less 'plug n chug'.

>>8750558
Or you could just have a lot of good students in the class and it doesn't make sense to artificially fail people. Not to mention harder exams also means fuck all and hard problem sets are worth way more pedagogically.

>>8750202
This is the rule of most of Europe. Go to Oxford and they'll pass you with 50%, for some classes 40%. That doesn't mean its any easier to pass.

>>8742493
State universities have way less grade inflation compared to shitholes like ivy leagues. People meme but the prestigious institutions are the real brainlet schools. Purdue hasn't had any grade inflation in like 100 years.

>>8750736
>>8749398

Here the grades are all over the place, we have courses where you pass with <40% of points and others where you need more, depends on how hard it is. I think they just make sure about half the people drop out in the first year since there are no entry exams

Since there isn't a single monkey on this thread, I'll tell you the brazilian grade system:

0-49: lol, try again
50-65: pass, acceptable score for a STEM studant if the professor is an asshole
66-75: notable studant
76-85: the 1%
86-100: bribes professors

>>8750774
In some places you have to get 60 do pass, but you got it pretty right.

>>8750774
In Bolivia it is pretty much like this except in the pay4grades universities. I had a professor that had a strange exam grading system. If you failed 1 out of 15 questions you were automatically put at 60%. If you failed 5 questions you failed the entire exam,

>>8750557
They also do that for mathematics olympiads.
They do it to, you know, select those students who actually are good at doing real math. You can prepare for it by solving challenging problems.

>>8744482
This is IMO a problem with paying for education. People expect to get their degree when they pay, you can't let them fail. In Europe (at least in Germany) you will fail your class if you are bad. If you fail a class 3 times you are not allowed to study the subject anymore.

>>8752548
>You are not allowed to study the subject anymore

So if you get into engineering and realize you hated that specifig engineering and switch over to a different enigneering that has the same subject, are you not allowed to read it?

Third world Filipino shithole here:
92-100 A/4
85-91 B/3
...
72-75 D
Below 72 F

Everything is easy so anybody with a brain or the capacity to read a book should pass. STEM always has 21-26 units per semester though (30+ hours if with labs) because of a lot of required classes like taxation or Filipino. All courses have equal weights regardless of major.

I can't imagine how it would be like to have semesters below that number of units.

>>8752575
If you fail a course which is essential in every engineering program 3 times, yes.

>>8752575
I was talking about the degree itself, not about studying the subject, obviously

>>8749904
Reminds me of an exam about signal theory where they had to adjust the scores in such ridiculous ways to get a legal passing rate

Anyway, for the first year in engineering at my university in Belgium (Flanders)
0-49: try again, retard
50-55: congratulations, you passed!
55-65: good enough
65-80: pretty good senpai
80-90: r u an ayylien
90+: almost impossible

Although i have to admit getting 70+ is quite easy once you are in your master

>>8742493
I have a friend who goes to an Ivy league uni, and I myself go to a world top 10 (according to QS and Times Higher Education) UK uni. When I compare the amount of work we both put in, graduate admissions and the difficulty of the curriculum, I'd say the equivalence is roughly as follows:
US 2.5-3.0=UK 50-59%: You really have to not try to get this as your average
US 3.0-3.5=UK 60-69%: This is what most people get with moderate amounts of trying
US 3.5-4.0=UK 70-79%: Good students who put in moderate amounts of work or mediocre students who put in an above average amount of work
UK 80%+: Good students who study good amounts will get these grades on individual exams, but individuals with averages in this band are rare

>>8753584
Yeah, that's blatantly wrong and retarded and you're a shitposting faggot.

>>8744772
The top tier universities in the US have a very high prestige, yes. The common small universities and colleges, the average case, is absolute garbage tho compared to the european average.

>>8753584
>because me and my """""friend""""" say this and that this is true because I am great and superior
make 3.7-4.0 the equivalent to UK 80%+ and you got it though

German grade system (in universities):

1.0 - the best
1.3
1.7
2.0
2.3
2.7
3.0
3.3
3.7
4.0 - worst
5.0 - you failed

From all your courses, your average score weighted by the credits you got for each exam is calculated. You usually need an average grade of at least 2.0 or 2.5 (depending on university and subject) to get into a masters degree.

>>8750202
I studied one year abroad in Edinburgh and you could pass classes with 40%. Everything was a cakewalk.
In the school I did in France you couldn't pass with less than 50% (10/20) and you didn't have any mean to retake or compensate with other classes (even though I think that changed now)

>>8750175
I know that feel.