American school system grades

Grading in education is the application of standardized measurements to evaluate different levels of student achievement in a course. Grades can be expressed as letters usually A to F , as a range for example, 1 to 6 , percentages, or as numbers out of a possible total often out of The exact system that is used varies worldwide.

In some countries, grades are averaged to create a grade point average GPA. A GPA is often calculated for high school , undergraduate , and graduate students.

American school system ages

Grades are also used in decisions to provide a student with financial aid or a scholarship. Grades are seen as an indicator for academic success and ability, and GPA is thought to indicate future job effectiveness and success. Students were given assessments as far back as B. The first record of a grading scale for students was at Yale University.

Yale University historian George Wilson Pierson writes: "According to tradition the first grades issued at Yale and possibly the first in the country were given out in the year , when President Ezra Stiles , after examining 58 Seniors, recorded in his diary that there were 'Twenty Optimi , sixteen second Optimi , twelve Inferiores Boni , ten Pejores.

Bob Marlin argues that the concept of grading students' work quantitatively was developed by a tutor named William Farish and first implemented by the University of Cambridge in That assertion has been questioned by Christopher Stray, who finds the evidence for Farish as the inventor of the numerical mark to be unpersuasive.

American school system high school

It has been criticized that grades are only short-term snapshots of how much a student has learned in a given period of time, which only partially reflect the actual performance and does not take sufficient account of the individual development of students. It is criticized that students often do not learn for their future life or out of interest in the material, but only for the grades and the associated status, which promotes bulimic learning.

German philosopher and publicist Richard David Precht criticizes the system of school grades in his book Anna, die Schule und der liebe Gott: Der Verrat des Bildungssystems an unseren Kindern.