To think that 70% should not be an A

[Arealmanithink]

Background: I'm American. Grading is different in the US. In the US, the scoring goes , 89-100% = A, 79-89% = B, 69-79% =C anything below 65% is failing. I don't think the school work is that different but I do think that the standards are lower in the UK. I'm amazed.

I studied both in the UK and the US and the grades are equivalent i would say! It was much easier for me to get 90% in the US than it was to get 70 in the UK! So its just different grading percentages but overall works out the same

As others have said, it comes down to how hard the exam is how people are expected to do.
English kids grew up with 50% as a 'pass' mark, so say 50-60% being a C at GCSE and 70% being an A, then at university 50% is a 2:1 and 70% a First, with lots of variation.

All my work at school was marked out of 10 or 20 and 7/10 was 'good', 8 very good, 9 almost unheard of except in maths where there were clear right/wrong answers. The idea of getting 90% in a test would lead us to assume the test was too easy and a waste of time.
(the scene in a later Little House book where Laura is sad not to make a perfect grade in school and is shocked to get only 93/100 once, is funny to me)

When I did my MSc one student got accepted to an American PhD program as long as she got an average of over 90%. It took the course coordinators a lot of effort to explain that only 2 students in 20 years had got over 70 and this girl's average of 65 was in fact excellent! Their inability to understand stats nearly persuaded her to go elsewhere (it was a science PhD using stats...)

University exams are basically graded between 40-70, below being a fail and above being exceptional. As a pp mentioned hitting the 80s or 90s is truly remarkable.
As far as I know the grades are translated into American when they are sent back to American universities, so a 70 will be graded as an A. It’s not that it’s easier to get an A; it’s that it’s extremely difficult to get 89%

Exams here are designed so that it's practically impossible to get 100%, though.

You can't tell if standards are higher or lower because it spends on the questions. Historically the standards have always been higher in the UK than in the US.

Grading is different in the US

There's your answer.

My father was a senior lecturer at a prestigious university in the Netherlands and he noticed that the US students who came into first year university on exchange always, always, always needed ret medial teaching. So I don't think US standards are that great.

Also the point above about US high school standards being roughly equivalent to UK GCSE (which is sat 2 years earlier) should be a bit painful for you.

I did a law degree and the best exam I ever did I got a 74 - it was the highest mark and I was very proud of myself. I deserved the A. None of us ever got over 80 on an essay or exam!

The US tends to do multiple choice which is completely different to writing a series of essays in an exam.

It is controversial about degree classifications, though. I have sat in a meeting where an external examiner told my very senior colleagues they were basically fucking things up for their students because they were sending them out with grades like 65 or 70, and US universities were looking at the grade and rejecting the student for postgrad, even though that student was excellent and at the same level as a US student with scores in the 90s.

Some UK universities have gone/are going over to scoring with the full range up to 100, and it's confusing if you don't know which are which. I sort of like the idea of saying a score of 85 ought to indicate someone is absolutely, stratospherically brilliant and a score of 90 is reserved for God in person, but it's a bit arrogant too.

But there are so many US/UK miscommunications about education. Degree grades are just scratching the surface. The one I love is how effusive you have to be about students for the US market, but I also enjoy the fact that we'd get references from US contexts where they'd tell us seriously how so-and-so was such a great moral character, such an excellent all-round person with true Christian values.

And we'd be like, uh, nice, but so long as they haven't literally broken the law we are pretty much ok with them being personally terrible ...

@Arealmanithink

Background: I'm American. Grading is different in the US. In the US, the scoring goes , 89-100% = A, 79-89% = B, 69-79% =C anything below 65% is failing. I don't think the school work is that different but I do think that the standards are lower in the UK. I'm amazed.

I'm amazed that you think you can make any kind of valid comparison between apples and zebras

What an odd post

I went from school min the UK to undergrad in the US and later on was a lecturer/examiner at an RG uni in the UK.

I was so shocked at the lax marking in the US and thought it was completely bizarre when I regularly got 100% for essays etc. No piece of writing is perfect. I even got told off by my teacher for seeming 'indifferent' to her high grades of my work (because I didn't think they were that amazing by UK standards).

In my years setting and marking Oxbridge exams nobody came even close to 100%. It would have been utterly impossible due to the design, length and complexity of the exams. I think the highest I ever saw was about a 91% and that paper was passed around for the whole examining committee to have a look at.

I grew up.in the States and they used the bell curve and then awarded the percentage points based on that.
I think there are huge holes in my education and I wr t to a very good school.

University exams are basically graded between 40-70, below being a fail and above being exceptional. As a pp mentioned hitting the 80s or 90s is truly remarkable.

For our finalists (I'm an academic in non-science department), a mark below 50 is rarer than a mark above 79. The normal range is probably 58-78. I've only ever given a 90 to an undergrad once, though, and that was for something that went on to be published with almost no changes in a peer-reviewed journal.

I can see the OP's point that 70 shouldn't be an A, if the issue is university grading - there's been very significant grade inflation in the last decade, and if you have a situation in which 50% of assessments are getting 70 or over (and probably 50% of them would have been given a mid-high 60s ten years ago), it's probably time to re-think what an A - or a 1st - is.

What a nonsense post on every level.

The logic used doesn't really support the hypothesis that the standards in the US system are higher than in the UK one.......

Universities have a way of comparing different grading systems. You can look up the equivalencies in marks (e.g. GPA). Same for most qualification systems.

I've also had a fair few American students over the years and no, I don't think their standards are higher.

Students who come from mainland Europe often do extremely well.

Disconnected.. I think you've got it. every one else.. Notaladyinred No they're not all multiple choice. I have no idea where you got that from. No they're not all easily graded and they are on a bell curve , because well, that makes sense. . I was just trying to get a feel on the differences I'm getting that they're just different. Misseb- Thanks for that.

I don't think standards are lower in the UK. At our uni, we had American students who'd come over for a term, and loads of them complained the stricter grading meant their GPA went down.

Apparently it's much harder to get an A over here. And my uni was only a mid-tier kind of place.

In Arts subjects (and some science subjects) where opinion and analysis is involved in both answering and marking, then anything over 70% is excellent. It's not like, say, calculus, where there are absolute right and wrong answers [confused[

I'd have thought that that would be obvious

And as others have pointed it, even when there are quantitatively (as opposed to qualitatively) absolute right and wrong answers, it depends on how difficult the exam/test was.

I remember when I was at Uni at St Andrews, the Americans who were coming over on exchange programmes being peeved that they were being put into 1st year classes as they would have being going into 3rd year in the States - yet then discovering that they were struggling even at 1st year level.

It actually means it's easier in the US as everyone in the class is expected to fully comprehend 80% of the curriculum without much study with not much more to learn past that.

Your statement is meaningless without context. You’re not selling me the idea of American education being superior with your analysis and conclusion

I got 98% in an honours class maths exam in secondary school. Only time ever in my life.

The person sitting beside me asked me what I got. I told her. She said 'yes, it is very neat'.

@Arealmanithink, a friend of mine is American but has done part of her studies in the USA part in-the uK .
Her comment is ‘it’s 100x times easier to get good grades in the US than in the UK’. Basically people are expecting more from the students to get top marks.

It depends on the unversity, the exam board, the cohort and the invigilating and overseeing board..

I did a degree two years ago. The pass was 48 percent, no one got over 70 at first but in the second year the marks were raised as the overseeing board judged the teachers had marked too harshly.

No one ever got 90

Sounds like they're not equivalent.. I'll give my kids a break. Thanks all! I've been here 15 yrs and only now is it coming to light.. Wow..

Having taught at a UK university, including a module that was particularly popular with US exchange students, I think saying that standards are either 'higher' or 'lower' in the US is misleading; they're just different. US university students study a much broader range - they aren't nearly as specialised as a UK degree - which means that their subject-specific knowledge is necessarily less, but there are intellectual advantages to a broader education, too.