How bad is grade inflation in America? You always hear about Americans having a 4.0 GPA like it's fairly common, but in other countries only the top 1-5%% would be able to achieve such a grade.
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.
The latter
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.
>Either Americans are all geniuses, or they have a very easy curriculum.
or shit is scaled differently, faggot.
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.
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.
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.
>Chinks get high test scores/grades
>such skill! much intelligence!
>Americans do the same
>muh grade inflation! muh watered down material!
>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".
the problem comes when niggers start to get As. Chinks have their 109 average IQ backing them.
niggers don't go to college.
>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.
>come from country with no GPA
>interviewer asks for GPA
>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.
>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?
>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.
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.
>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!
>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.
>Take
Yale*
>niggers don't go to college
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
Why would employers want to hire anyone with a 0.0 gpa though?
I suppose that our grade system would be adjusted so anyone who got 50-60% wouldn't get a 0 GPA.
>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.
Why tho?
feels good living in Canada
Are you shitting me with this...
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.
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
this all applies to every province in Canada btw
In many courses attendance and homework counts directly towards your grade, ~25% of it.
Given that, it is literally impossible to get
>take accurate and easily understandable number
>convert it to less accurate number
>convert that number to a letter
Americans.
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.
>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?
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.
>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.
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:collections.uiowa.edu
Basically gives a comparison between US and Australian universities.
>MIT
>grade inflation
LOL
really fucking bad unless you go to like a top 10 school.
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.
>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.
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
>E
atleastyoutried.jpg
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.
>medical innovation comes from the country that sells healthcare as a product
Gee I wonder why
>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"
MIT used a 5 point scale for all classes and doesn't count the first semester of freshman year, so it is very inflated.
It's to balance out the grade inflation in the US
So you get 40 points for free or what?
Where do you live that all grades are passing grades?
>He depends on his proffessors
Brainlets everyone
You would be more credible if you stopped talking out of your ass
>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
What's the point in having non-passing grades? A fail is a fail
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
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%
>American """education"""
Same here at NTNU, the first As I got felt really good, Getting only As is unheard of.
VU University.
My course was only offered there or Leiden. I already live in Amsterdam, so the choice was fairly easy.
Is E still passing, or why does it end at 40?
Hva studerer du?
Yeah E is still passing.
uio.no
banned
In UK
A - 70%
B - 60%
C - 50%
At most universities about 15% of the class average over 70% overall.
data, tar phd nå
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.
0 =Fail
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
wait really? thats great since it's not even hard here
fucking socialists
alberta is the texas of Canada... we are the most anti commie province (mainly because every province loves to suck out our money)
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?
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.
>let's teach everyone to count again so 100% of the class understands everything fully
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.
>B 77 - 91
lol american education xD
>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.
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
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.
Russian ?
>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.