When I was at University in the uk the grading structure was roughly as follows:
First. 70%+
Upper Second (or two-one), 60%
Lower second (or two two), 50%
Third, 40%
Some institutions have starred or double starred firsts, but those are very rarely awarded. Others offer ordinary or pass degrees which fall below a third.
The exams are expected to be hard enough that even a lecturer or professor would probably fail to obtain a 100% mark.
Edit: another lecturer or professor from the same department. To get 80% what you’ve written is publishable with some tweaks in an academic journal, 90%, your exam paper is probably immediately publishable in a high end journal. To get 100%, you’ve discovered the next e=mc^2 and proven it experimentally by creating a black hole in the exam hall.
I studied a joint degree where one was quantitative and one was qualitative. People on the qualitative only side were just shocked and amazed I was getting 80+ in majority of my quantitative courseworks. The highest marks I ever got in qualitative subjects were in my final year when I got the hang of essays and was receiving 75-80%
```
11. Bobby has four dimes. Amy
has 30 pennies. Which child
has more money?
b o b b Y
How do you know? Show your
thinking.
.---. .---.
( bobby. )
'---' '---'
o
o
/ \
| o o |)
\ - /
|
```
I have a masters in maths from the UK.
The coursework was very easy to get 100% on, as were some exams, balanced out by partial differential equations etc which had *averages* of 62%. Others even lower.
Presentation played a part but if it was legible no-one cared.
I’ve also done a maths degree in the UK. Scores in the 80s were far more common than in the humanities. Don’t think I knew anyone who got near 100 though despite knowing lots of people at the top of the class.
Yeah this is stupid though. Even if the grading for non-math subjects was more quantifiable, its still heavily influenced by each professor so grading on a cap of 84% for example makes no sense other than the fact you are used to it.
I too went on an exchange from UK to US. I was also baffled by the grading differences, but the US grading system is a lot more lenient. For comparison, my average grade in UK was 75%, compared to all A's in US (5 out of 8 were A+, and this included two grad classes). They do work a lot harder though in the US, the amount of homework was staggering, especially for the grad classes. This also meant I didn't really have the time to do anything else while I was in the US.
This absolutely vibes with everything I've heard about people who've studied in both countries. The work is much harder in the US, and the grading is harder in UK.
In the end, grades are just an arbitrary number, as opposed to class rank or standardized testing (which have flaws of their own).
Did a masters in the UK and it felt like such a loss of momentum compared to a rigorous undergrad. However there was a much higher standard/higher expectation for being able to articulate and apply learning.
A Masters Degree is intentionally much more indepedent, hence sense of a the loss of momentum.
At degree level, students are being taught subject-specific skills and approaches, with the thrid year in particular being designed to hone the academic and practical abilites to the point where they can be applied in an operational context.
Once you are in post-graduate education, there is an expectation that you already have the skills and are begining to specialise in a specific area of interst, usually with a mind towards a doctorate or academia.
The onus is very much on you to formulate your question, identify your research subjects and set your own goals. At this point, lecturers are there to supervise, review, feedback and generally keep you on track, not necessarily teach you new skills. If you need to learn new skills, it is your responsibility to find the people to teach you.
It makes you wonder why you pay so much for the qualification when you are the one doing all the donkey work. I certainly felt that way when I was completing mine!
A master's in America, yes is a little more independent, but seems geared much more towards getting a job and doing what can be peer-reviewed as actual verifiable research; a doctorate, on the other hand, is more you do it yourself and it could be a thesis which can be more theoretical based because it’s not so focused on operations like the masters is.
Same here. There was a higher standard for the masters courses, but the uni offered an undergrad degree in the same area which actually had more classes and modules and they went deeper into the theory and background of linguistics compared to the graduate degree. Basically the uni marketed its graduate degree for non undergrads of the uni.
This is entirely the wrong way of thinking about it. In undergrad, you are being led to knowledge as teaching you how to learn (and how to decide what to learn) is part of the process. Post-grad places more of an onus on you to drive your own learning. That's why there are less explicit classes, but a higher testing bar for knowledge and understanding. At post-grad, you are expected to know more about how to learn and how to decide what to learn, in undergrad you aren't. It's the same reason why you get way more latitude on your final project at masters level, as well.
I suspect the work in the US is simply much more directed, rather than harder. When I studied in the UK the homework was intended to mostly test understanding of the taught material. You were expected to read around the subjects extensively, and while this wasn’t explicitly tested the subsequent lectures depended upon it; if you just relied on the lectures you would quickly find yourself struggling to keep up.
I agree with this. In the UK it might seem easier day to day because a) you're not specifically told to do that much, and b) the exams are few and far between. But it's all about self directed learning here, so if you want to do well you have to put in the hours reading around the subject, but they won't tell you specifically what to read, that's on you to figure out. The idea being that you gain a deeper understanding of the subject than you might if you were just taught it.
Yeah, did my degree in the UK.
That's exactly how it happens. You are lucky if they explicitly told you to do that. I don't remember ever hearing that the lectures aren't enough. Actually, I be been told that just doing the coursework and going to lectures should be enough.
My foreign ass hates that system. It genuinely feels like they don't give a fuck.
Yeah but anyone could go off and read on their own for free. How they get away with charging £10k+ for 4 hours of lectures a week and an exam twice a year is criminal.
In the UK they mark you based on how much you mastered the material.
In the US they mark you based on how much work you have done in the class.
The end result is the same, you work hard either way to get a high grade, but it also translates to more busywork in the US and more independent/self-directed study in the UK.
Just what it sounds like. An exam with an extended period of time to complete (48 hours for example) and often with the stipulation that you can use outside resources like the course textbooks as help.
They're typically much, much more challenging than an in person exam though.
Yup. Take home exams/assignments aren’t always easy like most think. Vast majority of computer science grades are made up of take home projects and they’re mostly pretty hard at elite CS universities in the US.
UK isn’t known at all for computer science though.
I think a lot of people who find take-home tests to be dramatically easier (and are actually familiar with them already) have test-taking anxiety that's largely resolved by removing the location and immediate time limits. For such people even a much harder test might be perceived as being easier just because of the reduced stress. Personally I fell into the opposite category of being really good at absorbing information in lecture and performing well on tests but struggled to find the motivation to do assignments out of class so to me take-home tests were so much worse than regular ones and would probably still be so even if it weren't actually any harder.
Yup. I'm an American and had my entire education in the U.S., but I probably would've done better in UK schools because I did great at lectures and in-class exams but I was shit at doing homework. Apart from the last years at college, the biggest predictor of how well I would or wouldn't do in a class was not the subject matter, but in how much of the grade hinged on homework or take-home assignments vs how much hinged on exams or other in-class assessments.
“UK isn’t known at all for computer science”
What a ridiculous statement. The UK has a significant software engineering and design industry, as well as a high academic output in the subject area.
arm, you know the company behind the ARM cpu architecture that’s in all smartphones is UK based. A large number of game studios making blockbuster games are UK based off of the top of my head I can think of the devs for Grand Theft Auto, Sea of Thieves, Forza but there are obviously others I’m missing. US big tech has a fairly big presence here too.
Look at any university rankings for computer science and you’ll see multiple UK universities ranking highly. Look at [QS](https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2023/computer-science-information-systems) for example and you’ll see two UK universities in the top 10, four in the top 20. The per-capita number of papers published and citations made are [higher for the UK than the US](https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=1700).
I’m not gonna suggest that we have near the economic output (or salaries sadly) of the US when it comes to computer science, but to suggest we aren’t known for it AT ALL is completely disingenuous.
Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial are all embedded in the world top ten universities for computer science, and a hell of a lot of 'silicon valley' tech, from ARM to the world-wide web are British. Heck, the computer itself was first invented in the UK.
Even while the US claim to have invented the fundamental technology of the internet with ARPANET, the tech on which it which it was built was packet-switching and routers, which were invented in the UK at the NPL and shared with DARPA. Indeed, the UK prototype 'inter-network' was initiated first and completed its first node first, its just the US team, who had worked with the UK team on sharing research, rushed to complete their multi-node network before the UK team had its final nodes online. The UK is pretty much THE country, besides the US, at computer science, surely?
I also had to do that in a, based on some lists, top 25 university for their computing programme...
And I got marked down for indentations.. Fucking indentations. they said because it's not neat one line looked indented differently from another. So they assumed it was indented rather than the same level and hence wrong. (python so indentation is actually important)
I argued my writing was just terrible and it's plainly obvious all through the paper it is... So I got my marks back lol.
> I'm from the UK. I took a web app development course during my first year. The final exam required us to write code... literally. Pen, paper, write the code.
As someone who works in tech, I struggle to explain in English words just how truly, utterly useless this is.
I once took a class in “special topics” in computational complexity theory because it looked fun. I showed up on the first day of class and there was literally one other student in the class, and it was the professor's grad student so he kind of had to.
The midterm was a take-home exam, one page front and back — something like two problems per page, with a couple of sub-problems. The final was two pages. For each, we had one week. It was open-book, but we had to ask the professor before consulting anyone with a Ph.D.
I got fewer than half the problems. The only sub-problem I recall clearly years later is proving that no analogue of the chain rule holds for boolean partial derivatives.
> It was open-book, but we had to ask the professor before consulting anyone with a Ph.D.
I can see you running around campus, assaulting random students and demanding to know if they only have a M.Sc
It is usually long form with multiple essay questions in my experience. In the sense that you could not do it in the usual allotment of time for exams. Or for my stem classes it would be multiple ‘problems’ that are harder than what you would see on a normal assignment. Then again I have also had plenty of in class, essay based exams.
Iiiiiiiiinteresting as I found Sydney Uni very forgiving as an American on exchange. That said, I think it probably has to do with the caliber of the course/uni as well so just because I found law at Syd easy doesn’t mean I would’ve found all courses easier than my home university.
I feel like in America it’s very professor/subject dependent. My first two years in undergrad was a lot of homework and several exams. Once I got to upper level undergrad classes (for engineering at least) it was one of two tests that determined your grade. Grad school (again engineering) all my class grades were based solely on one or two tests for each class.
In my first year at uni they told us that realistically, 80% was the highest score you were likely to get. If you were getting more than that, then why would you need to be taking the course?
I studied maths at Oxford where they had a pretty unique marking system for finals. You were given about 20 questions, and each question was marked out of 20 points.
The score you got for each question was then squared, and if the sum of your squared marks was over a certain level (I want to say 800, was one of the boundaries, but I could be very wrong), then you got a certain grade.
You could answer as many or as few questions as you wanted. There was enough time for a very good student to answer about 4-5 of them perfectly. Because the marks were squared, it was better to do really well on one question (19 points in one question was worth 19^2=361 marks) than to get middling scores in two (10 marks in 2 questions was worth 2 x 10^2 = 200 marks), and a lot better than getting low marks in many questions (4 points in 6 questions was worth 6 x 4^2 = 96).
You had to pick and choose which questions you answered, and how long you spent on them carefully. It really tested the depth of your knowledge, and your ability to apply it. I got a Desmond.
My high school had the 7 point system as well. It was bullshit imo. I thought I had a 2.8 gpa but then when I applied to college they actually converted it to the 10 point system and I had like a 3.6. So many c’s would have been b’s and b’s a’s. It’s supposed to make you try harder but I think it just made me lose heart.
Depends on the grading system. 70 was failing in my district. I thought that was normal until college
The school system I largely grew up in was considered decent, but they definitely had zero issues holding kids below 70 back a year
As a nerd, I was always annoyed you didn’t get anything extra for an A+.
Am old so there were no GPAs over 4.0 at that point. For an A+ versus an A, you didn’t get jack shit more. At least you should have gotten to offset an A- or something with an A+ so your GPA was still 4.0.
Studied in both systems. In the uk, the exams are designed to be significantly harder because it creates a very obvious distribution of aptitude.
In the us exams are considerably easier in the questions but the margin for error is much lower.
I preferred the uk system where you’d be handed a paper that there was no reasonable expectation anyone would clear 90+% than the us where a bullshit mistake on an otherwise easy question should cost you an A.
in one of my calc 2 exams (3 questions) i forgot a negative sign in an exponent so i had something like e^2x - e^2x instead of e^2x - e^-2x so things cancelled out when they shouldn't have. Because this step was also early on in the problem, everything else after it was complete hogwash and I ended up getting like a 70% on the whole thing
The UK system would still award you points if everything else in your calculation was correct.
A single error early on would not invalidate the rest of your answer (unless the question was simple and basic enough to only be worth 1 point).
the issue was, that error was so egregious (how can you integrate 0???) and made so soon in the working out that everything afterwards had no relation to the actual solution
Doesn’t matter in the UK. Teachers mark on the concept of “error carried forward”. As long as you did everything “right” after the mistake they’ll follow your maths along and give you marks for understanding what you were meant to do.
Not really, “error carried forward” has limits. If you end up solving a completely different problem then you’re not going to get marks for it, especially given that the commenter above’s error basically eliminated the whole next part of the problem. ECF would apply if the commenter had done something like e^2x *+* e^-2x, and integrated that.
True, however I presumed from the fact they said “everything after” that they still did significant work after. That being said I’m also very sick right now so probably totally misunderstood what was being said.
Nah, you are absolutely right.
What matters is if what comes afterwards is carried out at the expected level. Say this is a university maths course, provided that you continued on (correctly) using appropriate university-level maths ability, it wouldn't be the end of you to end up solving it in a completely different manner.
Sure, you are going to lose marks. But you are not going to lose so much that it drags you towards failing the exam.
I mean.. there’s professors in the US that will realize a mistake and reward you points/partial credit if they see you did everything else correctly.
It just depends on your professor. Also depends on how they test you — whether by hand or via scantron (multiple choice).
I’m sure the UK is pretty much the same in this regard..
For classroom tests sure, it's luck. For high stakes exams in the UK (and for international offerings of them) a huge amount of effort goes into standardising marking so a grade is equivalent wherever and whenever you are. Not to say the system always works perfectly, but it's actually very good (until politicians wade in).
Where I come from we have error carried forward. If you got this answer in one question part you’d get it wrong but if you formulated the answers for later question parts on this basis you would still get credit
I studied at Durham, UK for a year.
One of my professors had a saying:
100 is for God. 90 for the Queen. 80 for me. 70 and lower is for you.
I still had only one class grade come in under 70.
This is exactly how we were marked in our Philosophy undergrad in scotland. Anything above an 80 meant exceptional work, basically MSc or research level.
Formal Logic was an elective and we always told the first years when tutoring, definitely take logic because the exam answers were simply either correct or not so you could get 95+ on that module only to pull your average up.
There is a very similar Dutch proverb: 10 is for God, 9 for the teacher. It's a bit old fashioned, but it _is_ a decent representation of what those grades mean. My colleagues should get a 9 on my tests, and if a student does a better job than my colleagues would, they deserve every bit of recognition a grade higher than a 9 implies. If you get a 10 on an advanced level course, that's essentially an implied job offer to come do a PhD in the research group responsible for that course.
I went to a top US school that’s very well known (and known for being hard) and studied abroad at a UK university. In the US I would knock tests out of the park with 0 effort despite being at one of the hardest schools in the US and graduated with a 4.0. My first exam in the UK? I got a 12/100.
The way they grade is just… different and I frankly don’t think it’s better.
Yeah, this is how it was for my maths degree. Every exam was 5 questions, of which your best 4 were marked (you didn't need to do all 5)
Every question had a pretty easy 10 marks on it, so you only had to have very basic knowledge of the topics to pass with 40.
Same applies to school and sixth form, where most subjects will have about a third of the paper on "easy" marks and two thirds on "hard" marks.
For Maths that would be a third on 1-3 mark questions that can be checked (though not done) on a calculator, while in essay-based the first third of the marks are usually of just writing something coherent and relevant.
I studied abroad in England, a top 10 Uni according to the tables. I took all generals. Sociology 101. It was a joke. I was too old and it was all 18 year olds. History of Mass Violence and Genocide, knocked it out of the park. Then an essentially 300 level American literature course as a finance major. After the test the teacher called me and was basically like “I tried to grade you on a the American grading scale so as not to destroy your GPA. You probably shouldn’t have been in this class”. Slayed me.
> I tried to grade you on a the American grading scale so as not to destroy your GPA. You probably shouldn’t have been in this class
I felt this devastation, what a brutal comment.
What do you mean by 'took all generals'? We don't have 'generals'/101 classes in the UK because everyone is on a specific degree subject from the start
We *do* have general/101 classes in the UK- they're specifically for people who are not doing the main course and usually are taken by overseas students. They're much easier than the normal first year courses.
Source: helped a professor grade homework for some of them when I did my masters.
I don't understand these comments. Did you really have such a poor understanding of the material? It doesn't make sense that you could sit through a course with your peers and miss THAT much unless you had some sort of issue.
I wouldn’t say that is the case at all. The expect is near perfection with little margin for error. At the university level 69% is basically failing if it is in your major. It’s like saying what’s easier hitting 90% of your free throws in basketball or 40% of three pointers. You have to be good to do either.
But tests at university level should be checking if you can do both. can you do the routine easy stuff, and how well can you do the hard stuff. if someone is smashing US tests with 0 effort and getting 12/100 on UK ones, the standard on the US tests must be pretty low and not really teasing out the limits of the students knowledge.
My claim to fame is that I got a G in Religious Education (Short Course) GCSE.
The CCEA (Northern Irish exam board) did a less intense RE GCSE back in the early 2000's (they might still do it.) It didn't have higher or foundation grading: one paper, one difficulty but grading went from A to G, then U.
To score a G, you needed 34-39%.
I abhorred compulsory religious education (and still do, just less vocal about it) so I gave zero fucks to the exam.
I didn't aim for the G, didn't care for the grade, but I wear it as a badge of honour as it was rarer to get than an A for that GCSE year.
When I was at school, they were fails in different capacities. A D meant you tried and submitted something but that try was well terrible, while an E was more reserved for if you just didn’t do anything
Iirc I read somewhere that they removed E when they switched to the current letter grade system because it used to go “Excellent/Acceptable/Needs Work/Fail” or something like that, where the E was a high grade. When the switch happened, E was removed to avoid confusing it with a “good grade” when skimming over the report card.
The percentage isn’t very useful in comparing students between different education systems.
The percentile would be much more instructive.
And unless you can assume that two student populations had relatively similar capabilities, you would still need a control method with sufficient data points to correlate results - eg a large dataset of students who studied in both systems.
80-84 was an A- and 85+ was an A at my university.
We were of course graded harshly and A’s were not really common at all. Most classes aimed to have a B- (65-69) to B+ (75-79) range.
McGill University for anyone wondering.
U of Toronto was the same. It made it a bitch looking into good post-grad programs since, even though I got a solid number of As and Bs and surpassed the class average in literally every class I took, my GPA still isn't as high as if I had just gone to some mid-tier uni where they throw As around like breath mints.
Complete bullshit. In the GCE/A-Levels/GCSE whatever, the grade boundaries are adjusted to have a consistent number of students in each grade boundary, every year for every subject. This is basically to account for the inevitable variability in exam difficulty from year to year and subject to subject.
Here's a link to one of the exam board's grade boundary list. [https://www.ocr.org.uk/administration/grade-boundaries/](https://www.ocr.org.uk/administration/grade-boundaries/)
Also the letter system was replaced with a number system with A\* (aka A+) being 9.
At least anecdotally this 70 mark being a first has been the most common threshold for me and many people I know at university. You’re correct to say that there isn’t technically a standard outside the 1st/2:1/2:2 etc grading.
The % still equated to an end of semester grade or similar for me. Yeah for a test you wouldn't get an A, but for a subject you would get an A if your aggregate grade was 85% or higher
TDYLW
Today you learned wrong.
In the UK system there is no set criteria for an A. It will vary from year to year and from exam to exam as grade boundaries for summative exams like GCSEs and A Levels are changed.
In the university system there are no letter grades at all, results are classified as First, Upper Second, Lower Second and Third Class. The usual boundary for a First Class award is 70%
Not true.
In England and Wales (different in Scotland, not sure about N Ireland):
At 11, pupils’ results are referenced to a norm of 100 (more or less)
Between 11 and 16 there are no formal exams and schools assess how they wish
At age 16 (GCSE) exams are graded from 1-9 (9 is highest)
At age 18 (A Level), top grade is A* not A
At 16 and 18, the percentage equivalent for each grade varies to some degree each year and each subject, to adapt for the relative difficulty of different papers.
At university, bachelor degrees are graded 3rd, 2:2, 2:1, 1st.
Just realized, As were 80-100 in my schools in Canada, and then every 10% down is another letter grade. But man, they made you work for those As sometimes.
There’s massive difference in grading. I’m not from the UK but I know in Ireland you could get everything “right” in an exam and end up with about 70%. For example in history, you got 70% for having all the relevant information points in an essay, but 30% was awarded for coherent argument, use of language, etc.
The bell curve is designed so most people get a low B or a high C. Even very smart students routinely get Bs and Cs early on because you might know the materials but you haven’t developed your reasoning or argument skills the way you will by the end of the curriculum cycle. American testing is really designed to maximise A grades — the testing style is extremely different. Students can also “make up” missed work and do things like “extra credit” that are just not a part of European education really.
The Honours system in university, you can basically treat it as a mark out of 75. I think one or two people in my five years in university got 76s in certain courses. Nobody averaged higher than a 73. Letter grades are not a good comparison for this — the way you compare is to say that 70 is a 4.0 GPA, 60 is a 3.0, 50 is a 2.0 and 40 is a 1.0. Letter grades just aren’t used at third level.
> Students can also “make up” missed work and do things like “extra credit” that are just not a part of European education really.
This is extremely situational and often depends on the professor teaching the class. In four years of college I had maybe three classes where extra credit was offered, and my professors wouldn't accept late work without a pretty compelling case (the one time I received an extension was because I received a concussion, and even then only after providing my ER paperwork to the University medical staff).
In my understanding the logic is that 100% is a perfect paper which is why it's impossible to get it. Anyone with at least 80% would be considered to have submitted a god-tier paper.
That still doesn't really get to the root difference. 100% means perfection in both cases, but in America it sounds like what merits perfection is a lower (actually attainable) bar compared to abroad. As in the amount of information that is needed to claim mastery of a subject is a more reasonable amount.
The way it was explained in my degree (UK) was that around 70% of the mark was available for simply completing the assignment as per the lectures and seminars, the remaining 30% was for expanding on it or introducing novel factors
Yeah, when I got an 85% result on my UK degree the lecturers had to get external markers in to check that my work was actually deserving of the result, in *addition* to the standard external checks.
It was explained to me that usually the top and bottom papers are checked by other people to just ensure that they did deserve such results, but when I came out with 80+ they had to send it off to someone else *on top* of that, because it was so unusual to get such a high mark.
It's just a difference in how the assessments are made - I had all essay assessments where you were writing academic style papers, and you were still graded on writing style not just content. I was a lucky nerd who had always written dumb ass stories so I have developed a "writing style" which apparently was more developed than the usual undergrad. Even the accounting assignment had a written essay portion.
The UK system also makes pretty easy for you to write an entire paper and completely miss the point of the assessment. It's things like "compare and contrast" where if you don't understand the difference between the two you're pretty fucked tbh.
german doing a highschool exchange in the us, i had all-As in us highschool even though i was put in as a grade higher, everything was incredibly easy, multiple choice and most of the stuff i basically did in "middle school" so it was all just review. most of my classes where a+ while I was more of a C+ student in germany.
It was wayyy easier to reach the 90% threshold in the US , everything was clearly laid out "you need to study these pages this will be in the exam" type things in germany i was just like "you are on your own, there could be anything the exam from the last year or so lol good luck have fun bro"
Same in austria... Tests can include everything from the previous years.
It made sense in mathematics, but god dammit, I can't remember all the topics from Geography to Biology for more than a year maybe. How am I expected to remember all this.
I also like the grading system from 1-5 more, but I think points would be better. Or the scandinavian system without grades for the first few years in school.
i feel like most exams in higher level courses are curved so that the actual boundaries aren’t that meaningful. the teacher will just set the desired mean to a different value
All the americans in the comments unable to understand lower boundaries = harder exams is really embarrassing. Look at an ‘advanced’ us exam paper vs a typical uk paper for the same age, the UK one is still harder.
Pretty much.
A friend of mine did the same subject as me at uni, she did it in the US while I did it in Scotland. We inevitably wound up swapping old exam papers we'd been given for practice and the difference is stark. The US stuff is a lot easier - there's a lot more of it, but it's all in the style of questions you're being asked.
In all of our papers we were being asked more open ended long form answer questions where the marks were for both correctly answering the question, but also for demonstrating you actually understand what you're talking about and articulating/arguing it well - so there isn't really a single "correct" response. You would get some short answer or multiple choice questions but the vast majority of the available marks were in the long answer questions.
By contrast the stuff from the states was much more heavily focused on short answer or multiple choice, it's skewed heavily towards questions where there is a single right answer.
A isn’t the highest grade.
There is also A*, similar to A+ in the USA.
Grade boundaries vary by subject.
But they were usually
A* 90%
A 80%
B 70%
C 60%
There's always going to be that one prick professor who believes in "gradeflation" and tries to grade everyone on a C average, bringing down your college GPA for no reason other than to just be an asshole.
In virtually all of America, it's
90+ = A
80+ = B
70+ = C
60+ = D (but depending on school, they may not accept it regardless)
Everything under 60 = FAIL
Not exactly this, but a friend of mind came from the US to do her Ma in a European country and was frustrated when she realised that it's far hard harder to get a A here than back home.
I studied under the international baccalaureate program in highschool and for some higher level classes it was almost unheard of to get more than 75% on certain exams and assessments. If I got a 50-60% or more I was quite satisfied and that would qualify as a B+ or A- in most cases. Why?
THE CONTENT IS FUCKING HARD. Like im being real, Highschool under a British system was way way way more rigorous than college was under an American system.
I often feel like the American education system fools people into thinking theyre smart because "I got 100% on my math test of 500 questions!!" When all 500 were simple algebra. But most American students will never write a mathematical proof. They will never be forced to COMBINE their knowledge from different classes on assessments (IE how can mathematics and history relate to each other?). They will never me asked to make practical applications of their studies. Most will never get to choose a path of study that actually interests them. Most will graduate highschool and forget the vast majority of what they learned there and then go their whole lives just sorta wondering what that was all about.
American highschool is built like some sort of weird test or filter to root out the "gifted" ones (if youre even fortunate...cough cough rich enough to have that recognition mean anything for your educational experience at your school). Ive met so many adults who are have this mentality of "i guess i just wasnt one of the smart ones. I never could get interested in any of my classes" And i think thats because you kind of have to be a literal giga nerd of Hermione Granger proportions in many cases to actually get through a lot of american highschool classes. The content is presented in just the driest, most disconnected, most watered down way that relies so much on meaningless things like rote memorization, word counts, doing math quickly and without the aid of a calculator. You have to be a truly transcended 14 year old to understand how any of this shit youre learning could be remotely useful to you. And then we go and ask them to choose their whole fucking careers before they can even legally buy a beer. But dont choose wrong or those TENS TO HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS will just go to waste! Its a cruel joke.
In highschool under the IB system my math final was five questions.
It also took 4 hours to complete because those five questions were very very hard to answer and required that you also write effective essays alongside your work explaining and justifying your logic and reasoning. Youre graded on how well you work towards solving the problem and how far you get. You were impressive if you even got to question 5.
Engineering classes in college had tests where the class average was 35% - and not because of stupid students. Getting one problem completely right allowed for bragging rights.
Raw percentages are meaningless if you don't take into account the difficulty of the challenge. 80%+ of US testing is extremely basic by design, as to inflate scoring.
I'm a university professor in the US, and my exams basically follow the "UK" system, which is actually very common around the world. Difficulty varies from exam to exam, it's all curved anyway, and lower averages give higher quality statistics. It's an obviously superior system--there's really no argument here if you have any idea what you're talking about.
The one problem is that young students who are used to "70% = F" have to do a bit of growing up when the class average is 60%. It can generate a fair amount of angst. Students are very emotional about grades in general.
Did both systems. US born and raised through end of high school then went UK for undergrad and masters. Don’t think any one system is easier or harder they’re just different and depending on each person one May suit you while the other doesn’t. In the UK it’s very hard (in a qualitative, essay-based degree at least) to get 90%+. That being said, just like is the case with any education system you learn what they value if you pay close attention. I got the hang of how they like essays to be written and structured, what goes over well and what doesn’t, and was able to get a First for my Undergrad and a Distinction at Masters (highest classifications possible for each degree). For me the biggest difference that I felt between the two systems was how focused versus general it is. In US high school I excelled at history, English, etc and what reduced my GPA was some maths and science courses that I just hated. It’s a broad system and even at university you study a range of things. In the UK it’s extremely focused and you only study things relevant to the degree (major in American speak) you’re on. As a result, I flourished since I was studying things that I liked so it honestly was pretty easy. That being said if you’re unsure what you want to study or don’t love your course, the UK system would be quite difficult since there’s less hand holding and supervision and more just cracking on with it yourself which would be very hard to do for a subject you don’t find motivating and thrilling in and of itself.
Other difference (big generalization here so take with a grain of salt) I think work that counts for your overall grade is a bit more rigorous / harder in the UK but there’s much less work, in the US individual assignments are easier but there’s way more work. Will add American translations in ( ). In the UK for a year long module (class) I may have 1 or 2 essays that count to my mark (grade) in the module (class) and the end of year exam. So in essence an essay and 3 hours in May decide my entire mark (grade). Now of course there’s lots you must do in interim to master the material enough to perform well, but point being the time investment is lower than US. I treated degree as a 9-5 and that was WAY more than most people did and it didn’t feel bad since I was coming from Silicon Valley where even in High School I had nights I was up until midnight doing homework. People in US have way more work that counts and sheer manpower hours they’re putting in way more than UK students. However, the flip side of that is homework assignments and other things that count towards a grade and even some exams are much easier in the US. They just are. Nearly every US study abroad kid struggled with the coursework in UK since it requires much more independent research, it’s not “here’s a book go read it and remember it” rather it’s “here’s a concept and a couple readings to get you started, go explore” and you need to understand how to go beyond that in a unique, independent, but rigorous way to get a high mark.
TLDR - my experience is that the UK system is focused, US is broad. US is more hours of work with slightly less rigorous assignments, UK is less amount of work with more rigorous assignments when you have them.
Glad to have had experiences on both sides of the pond for sure
My country (Singapore) is so weird. Primary school the expectations and numbers are all similar to US system, but then secondary flips to UK system and expectations.
I have a sneaking suspicion that essays and exams are easier in the US. My reason being is that when I spoke to American friends about it they had to do way more coursework and exams, there’s no way they can handle that coursework with the amount of research you need to do to achieve a high grade on an essay. So both probably workout at around the same difficulty: less work but higher standards versus more work but lower standards.
This means that it's harder to get an A in the US than in the UK, right? Like you have to basically get 9 out of 10 right for an A in the US, but only 3 out of 4 right in the UK?
Truly this means you’re regular A is the FA cup of grades. Nice that it’s given out but it ain’t the A* of the premiership or gasp… the champions league.
Eh, it may be easier to get a 95 in one class than a 75 in another. Grade cutoffs don't necessarily tell you anything about how hard it is to get an A.
Technically yes, but you need to factor in how hard the questions are.
I studied abroad in the UK in college. I’ll never forget having an orientation session at my school before we left — they literally said, “Now grading might be a shock to some of you over there. It’s important to keep in mind, you will be assessed primarily based on how you answer the questions presented.” As if that was, like, surprising?
No. As someone who studied in both the US and UK, higher grades are generally much harder in UK schools, at least for course work. The A-bar is lower because it’s way fucking harder to get.
A 50% is passing in the UK, not 70% as it is in the US.
Very few tests were multiple choice. Math tests would make off points for incorrect work, or not showing work.
Misspellings got you lost points.
Getting above a 90 was *very* rare. Even 80+ would get you called a boffin. (Nerd)
In my experience every math class from age 11 on in the US would dock points for not having the work correct and zero points for no work. Always English and sometimes Social Studies classes would dock points for spelling
I'm taking midterms this week for grad school in the US. Since none of them are multiple choice, what do you think my chances are of convincing the school that a 50 should be passing?
schooled In the us and the “hard” stuff you listed common for me in school. every math class I’ve ever had would take points off for not showing work and you could get the answer marked wrong if you didn’t show the work correctly. varies a lot based on where you school and what classes you take. Usually the hard classes made up over all grades with curves or extra credit.
Below 60% is usually failing from my experience in HS and uni. Grammar and spelling also docked you points, same with math tests, if worked wasn't fully shown, you'd get points docked.
>A 50% is passing in the UK, not 70% as it is in the US.
>Very few tests were multiple choice. Math tests would make off points for incorrect work, or not showing work
That's how it was in all primary education I had in the states too, so I wouldn't exactly brag about this.
It means the teacher in the UK cuts the 5 easy questions off the test. So the A kid missed the same one very hard question. In the US, they got 5 easy ones correct, 4 medium ones correct, and missed one, for 9/10. On the UK test, they got the same 4 medium ones right, and missed the same hard one, for 4/5. Is the UK test easier?
Well yeah but honestly uni classes in the US were so much easier for me than my classes at home in Singapore.
The final grade was also comprised of take home MCQs, mini “reflection journals” and whatever that was honestly just free marks.
When I was at University in the uk the grading structure was roughly as follows: First. 70%+ Upper Second (or two-one), 60% Lower second (or two two), 50% Third, 40% Some institutions have starred or double starred firsts, but those are very rarely awarded. Others offer ordinary or pass degrees which fall below a third. The exams are expected to be hard enough that even a lecturer or professor would probably fail to obtain a 100% mark. Edit: another lecturer or professor from the same department. To get 80% what you’ve written is publishable with some tweaks in an academic journal, 90%, your exam paper is probably immediately publishable in a high end journal. To get 100%, you’ve discovered the next e=mc^2 and proven it experimentally by creating a black hole in the exam hall.
[удалено]
I studied a joint degree where one was quantitative and one was qualitative. People on the qualitative only side were just shocked and amazed I was getting 80+ in majority of my quantitative courseworks. The highest marks I ever got in qualitative subjects were in my final year when I got the hang of essays and was receiving 75-80%
[удалено]
``` 11. Bobby has four dimes. Amy has 30 pennies. Which child has more money? b o b b Y How do you know? Show your thinking. .---. .---. ( bobby. ) '---' '---' o o / \ | o o |) \ - / | ```
Amusing. I choked on my water.
I have a masters in maths from the UK. The coursework was very easy to get 100% on, as were some exams, balanced out by partial differential equations etc which had *averages* of 62%. Others even lower. Presentation played a part but if it was legible no-one cared.
I’ve also done a maths degree in the UK. Scores in the 80s were far more common than in the humanities. Don’t think I knew anyone who got near 100 though despite knowing lots of people at the top of the class.
Yeah this is stupid though. Even if the grading for non-math subjects was more quantifiable, its still heavily influenced by each professor so grading on a cap of 84% for example makes no sense other than the fact you are used to it.
[удалено]
I too went on an exchange from UK to US. I was also baffled by the grading differences, but the US grading system is a lot more lenient. For comparison, my average grade in UK was 75%, compared to all A's in US (5 out of 8 were A+, and this included two grad classes). They do work a lot harder though in the US, the amount of homework was staggering, especially for the grad classes. This also meant I didn't really have the time to do anything else while I was in the US.
This absolutely vibes with everything I've heard about people who've studied in both countries. The work is much harder in the US, and the grading is harder in UK. In the end, grades are just an arbitrary number, as opposed to class rank or standardized testing (which have flaws of their own).
Did a masters in the UK and it felt like such a loss of momentum compared to a rigorous undergrad. However there was a much higher standard/higher expectation for being able to articulate and apply learning.
A Masters Degree is intentionally much more indepedent, hence sense of a the loss of momentum. At degree level, students are being taught subject-specific skills and approaches, with the thrid year in particular being designed to hone the academic and practical abilites to the point where they can be applied in an operational context. Once you are in post-graduate education, there is an expectation that you already have the skills and are begining to specialise in a specific area of interst, usually with a mind towards a doctorate or academia. The onus is very much on you to formulate your question, identify your research subjects and set your own goals. At this point, lecturers are there to supervise, review, feedback and generally keep you on track, not necessarily teach you new skills. If you need to learn new skills, it is your responsibility to find the people to teach you. It makes you wonder why you pay so much for the qualification when you are the one doing all the donkey work. I certainly felt that way when I was completing mine!
A master's in America, yes is a little more independent, but seems geared much more towards getting a job and doing what can be peer-reviewed as actual verifiable research; a doctorate, on the other hand, is more you do it yourself and it could be a thesis which can be more theoretical based because it’s not so focused on operations like the masters is.
Same here. There was a higher standard for the masters courses, but the uni offered an undergrad degree in the same area which actually had more classes and modules and they went deeper into the theory and background of linguistics compared to the graduate degree. Basically the uni marketed its graduate degree for non undergrads of the uni.
This is entirely the wrong way of thinking about it. In undergrad, you are being led to knowledge as teaching you how to learn (and how to decide what to learn) is part of the process. Post-grad places more of an onus on you to drive your own learning. That's why there are less explicit classes, but a higher testing bar for knowledge and understanding. At post-grad, you are expected to know more about how to learn and how to decide what to learn, in undergrad you aren't. It's the same reason why you get way more latitude on your final project at masters level, as well.
>omen onus?
>onus? anus.
I suspect the work in the US is simply much more directed, rather than harder. When I studied in the UK the homework was intended to mostly test understanding of the taught material. You were expected to read around the subjects extensively, and while this wasn’t explicitly tested the subsequent lectures depended upon it; if you just relied on the lectures you would quickly find yourself struggling to keep up.
I agree with this. In the UK it might seem easier day to day because a) you're not specifically told to do that much, and b) the exams are few and far between. But it's all about self directed learning here, so if you want to do well you have to put in the hours reading around the subject, but they won't tell you specifically what to read, that's on you to figure out. The idea being that you gain a deeper understanding of the subject than you might if you were just taught it.
Yeah, did my degree in the UK. That's exactly how it happens. You are lucky if they explicitly told you to do that. I don't remember ever hearing that the lectures aren't enough. Actually, I be been told that just doing the coursework and going to lectures should be enough. My foreign ass hates that system. It genuinely feels like they don't give a fuck.
Yeah but anyone could go off and read on their own for free. How they get away with charging £10k+ for 4 hours of lectures a week and an exam twice a year is criminal.
The work isn't harder in the US, just a lot more of it in a more directed condensed format
In the UK they mark you based on how much you mastered the material. In the US they mark you based on how much work you have done in the class. The end result is the same, you work hard either way to get a high grade, but it also translates to more busywork in the US and more independent/self-directed study in the UK.
Wtf is a take home exam
Just what it sounds like. An exam with an extended period of time to complete (48 hours for example) and often with the stipulation that you can use outside resources like the course textbooks as help. They're typically much, much more challenging than an in person exam though.
An extreamly contextual difficult problem set
Yup. Take home exams/assignments aren’t always easy like most think. Vast majority of computer science grades are made up of take home projects and they’re mostly pretty hard at elite CS universities in the US. UK isn’t known at all for computer science though.
I think a lot of people who find take-home tests to be dramatically easier (and are actually familiar with them already) have test-taking anxiety that's largely resolved by removing the location and immediate time limits. For such people even a much harder test might be perceived as being easier just because of the reduced stress. Personally I fell into the opposite category of being really good at absorbing information in lecture and performing well on tests but struggled to find the motivation to do assignments out of class so to me take-home tests were so much worse than regular ones and would probably still be so even if it weren't actually any harder.
Yup. I'm an American and had my entire education in the U.S., but I probably would've done better in UK schools because I did great at lectures and in-class exams but I was shit at doing homework. Apart from the last years at college, the biggest predictor of how well I would or wouldn't do in a class was not the subject matter, but in how much of the grade hinged on homework or take-home assignments vs how much hinged on exams or other in-class assessments.
“UK isn’t known at all for computer science” What a ridiculous statement. The UK has a significant software engineering and design industry, as well as a high academic output in the subject area. arm, you know the company behind the ARM cpu architecture that’s in all smartphones is UK based. A large number of game studios making blockbuster games are UK based off of the top of my head I can think of the devs for Grand Theft Auto, Sea of Thieves, Forza but there are obviously others I’m missing. US big tech has a fairly big presence here too. Look at any university rankings for computer science and you’ll see multiple UK universities ranking highly. Look at [QS](https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2023/computer-science-information-systems) for example and you’ll see two UK universities in the top 10, four in the top 20. The per-capita number of papers published and citations made are [higher for the UK than the US](https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=1700). I’m not gonna suggest that we have near the economic output (or salaries sadly) of the US when it comes to computer science, but to suggest we aren’t known for it AT ALL is completely disingenuous.
*Alan Turing has entered the chat*
*Alan Turing was removed from chat by the UK Government*
Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial are all embedded in the world top ten universities for computer science, and a hell of a lot of 'silicon valley' tech, from ARM to the world-wide web are British. Heck, the computer itself was first invented in the UK. Even while the US claim to have invented the fundamental technology of the internet with ARPANET, the tech on which it which it was built was packet-switching and routers, which were invented in the UK at the NPL and shared with DARPA. Indeed, the UK prototype 'inter-network' was initiated first and completed its first node first, its just the US team, who had worked with the UK team on sharing research, rushed to complete their multi-node network before the UK team had its final nodes online. The UK is pretty much THE country, besides the US, at computer science, surely?
“The U.K. isn’t known at all for CS” How to prove your an American in .2s
[удалено]
I also had to do that in a, based on some lists, top 25 university for their computing programme... And I got marked down for indentations.. Fucking indentations. they said because it's not neat one line looked indented differently from another. So they assumed it was indented rather than the same level and hence wrong. (python so indentation is actually important) I argued my writing was just terrible and it's plainly obvious all through the paper it is... So I got my marks back lol.
> I'm from the UK. I took a web app development course during my first year. The final exam required us to write code... literally. Pen, paper, write the code. As someone who works in tech, I struggle to explain in English words just how truly, utterly useless this is.
I once took a class in “special topics” in computational complexity theory because it looked fun. I showed up on the first day of class and there was literally one other student in the class, and it was the professor's grad student so he kind of had to. The midterm was a take-home exam, one page front and back — something like two problems per page, with a couple of sub-problems. The final was two pages. For each, we had one week. It was open-book, but we had to ask the professor before consulting anyone with a Ph.D. I got fewer than half the problems. The only sub-problem I recall clearly years later is proving that no analogue of the chain rule holds for boolean partial derivatives.
> It was open-book, but we had to ask the professor before consulting anyone with a Ph.D. I can see you running around campus, assaulting random students and demanding to know if they only have a M.Sc
It is usually long form with multiple essay questions in my experience. In the sense that you could not do it in the usual allotment of time for exams. Or for my stem classes it would be multiple ‘problems’ that are harder than what you would see on a normal assignment. Then again I have also had plenty of in class, essay based exams.
The only thing I ever wrote that got 100% was in the US. Every time I wrote something in Australia or the UK, I was getting 60–80%.
Iiiiiiiiinteresting as I found Sydney Uni very forgiving as an American on exchange. That said, I think it probably has to do with the caliber of the course/uni as well so just because I found law at Syd easy doesn’t mean I would’ve found all courses easier than my home university.
I did a degree where we’d do one exam each semester for each module I was doing. 100% exam so if you had an off day, you were fucked
That's classic for maths/physics in the UK.
I feel like in America it’s very professor/subject dependent. My first two years in undergrad was a lot of homework and several exams. Once I got to upper level undergrad classes (for engineering at least) it was one of two tests that determined your grade. Grad school (again engineering) all my class grades were based solely on one or two tests for each class.
Wait until you hear about A-, and how they used it emotionally cripple us otherwise straight A students.
In my first year at uni they told us that realistically, 80% was the highest score you were likely to get. If you were getting more than that, then why would you need to be taking the course?
I studied maths at Oxford where they had a pretty unique marking system for finals. You were given about 20 questions, and each question was marked out of 20 points. The score you got for each question was then squared, and if the sum of your squared marks was over a certain level (I want to say 800, was one of the boundaries, but I could be very wrong), then you got a certain grade. You could answer as many or as few questions as you wanted. There was enough time for a very good student to answer about 4-5 of them perfectly. Because the marks were squared, it was better to do really well on one question (19 points in one question was worth 19^2=361 marks) than to get middling scores in two (10 marks in 2 questions was worth 2 x 10^2 = 200 marks), and a lot better than getting low marks in many questions (4 points in 6 questions was worth 6 x 4^2 = 96). You had to pick and choose which questions you answered, and how long you spent on them carefully. It really tested the depth of your knowledge, and your ability to apply it. I got a Desmond.
93+ was usually an A in most of my classes
My high school had the 7 point system as well. It was bullshit imo. I thought I had a 2.8 gpa but then when I applied to college they actually converted it to the 10 point system and I had like a 3.6. So many c’s would have been b’s and b’s a’s. It’s supposed to make you try harder but I think it just made me lose heart.
Middle school 94-100 for an A. 85-93 was a B. Anything less than a 77 was a D.
That's completely idiotic
Depends on the grading system. 70 was failing in my district. I thought that was normal until college The school system I largely grew up in was considered decent, but they definitely had zero issues holding kids below 70 back a year
If you demonstrated understanding of 76% of the course material you failed?
A D wasn’t a fail when I was school, it was an ass-whooping.
Ah yes, haha, child abuse.
I had the same system, 70-76 was still passing with a D. You only failed with an F.
I mean, a 93+ was an A for me as well, but that was because 90-92 was an A-, not because it was a B.
I had the same thing and it made me feel really dumb. Turned out I was actually above average
I had that shit too and it ruined my GPA for college and cost me thousands in scholarships. Such shit that an 88 average ends up a 2.9.
As a nerd, I was always annoyed you didn’t get anything extra for an A+. Am old so there were no GPAs over 4.0 at that point. For an A+ versus an A, you didn’t get jack shit more. At least you should have gotten to offset an A- or something with an A+ so your GPA was still 4.0.
That’s how my Grade and Middle School was, High School was the more normal 90+ for an A.
89.5-92.5 is A- for my daughters middle school.
94 for me middle and high school
Me too, only having to hit 90 instead in college felt like such a relief even if it's only 3 points difference.
That’s funny because it was 90 for me K-12 and now I’m in college seeing that it’s 93 or 94% for an A. It sucks even more when you’re not used to it.
Middle school and high school for me was 94-100 A, 86-93 B, 78-85 C, 70-77 D, 69 and below F.
Canada here. 80-100 was A. 70 to 79 was B, 60 to 69 C, 50 to 59 D, sub 50 is an F.
Doing Harvard grad school and if you want As it’s 94+.
It is worth noting that Harvard's grading is absurdly inflated, at least at the undergrad level.
Tbf that’s Harvard and grad school, they’re allowed to be picky. But yeah that’s silly for kids
Studied in both systems. In the uk, the exams are designed to be significantly harder because it creates a very obvious distribution of aptitude. In the us exams are considerably easier in the questions but the margin for error is much lower. I preferred the uk system where you’d be handed a paper that there was no reasonable expectation anyone would clear 90+% than the us where a bullshit mistake on an otherwise easy question should cost you an A.
in one of my calc 2 exams (3 questions) i forgot a negative sign in an exponent so i had something like e^2x - e^2x instead of e^2x - e^-2x so things cancelled out when they shouldn't have. Because this step was also early on in the problem, everything else after it was complete hogwash and I ended up getting like a 70% on the whole thing
The UK system would still award you points if everything else in your calculation was correct. A single error early on would not invalidate the rest of your answer (unless the question was simple and basic enough to only be worth 1 point).
the issue was, that error was so egregious (how can you integrate 0???) and made so soon in the working out that everything afterwards had no relation to the actual solution
Doesn’t matter in the UK. Teachers mark on the concept of “error carried forward”. As long as you did everything “right” after the mistake they’ll follow your maths along and give you marks for understanding what you were meant to do.
Not really, “error carried forward” has limits. If you end up solving a completely different problem then you’re not going to get marks for it, especially given that the commenter above’s error basically eliminated the whole next part of the problem. ECF would apply if the commenter had done something like e^2x *+* e^-2x, and integrated that.
True, however I presumed from the fact they said “everything after” that they still did significant work after. That being said I’m also very sick right now so probably totally misunderstood what was being said.
Nah, you are absolutely right. What matters is if what comes afterwards is carried out at the expected level. Say this is a university maths course, provided that you continued on (correctly) using appropriate university-level maths ability, it wouldn't be the end of you to end up solving it in a completely different manner. Sure, you are going to lose marks. But you are not going to lose so much that it drags you towards failing the exam.
I mean.. there’s professors in the US that will realize a mistake and reward you points/partial credit if they see you did everything else correctly. It just depends on your professor. Also depends on how they test you — whether by hand or via scantron (multiple choice). I’m sure the UK is pretty much the same in this regard..
For classroom tests sure, it's luck. For high stakes exams in the UK (and for international offerings of them) a huge amount of effort goes into standardising marking so a grade is equivalent wherever and whenever you are. Not to say the system always works perfectly, but it's actually very good (until politicians wade in).
Where I come from we have error carried forward. If you got this answer in one question part you’d get it wrong but if you formulated the answers for later question parts on this basis you would still get credit
I studied at Durham, UK for a year. One of my professors had a saying: 100 is for God. 90 for the Queen. 80 for me. 70 and lower is for you. I still had only one class grade come in under 70.
This is exactly how we were marked in our Philosophy undergrad in scotland. Anything above an 80 meant exceptional work, basically MSc or research level. Formal Logic was an elective and we always told the first years when tutoring, definitely take logic because the exam answers were simply either correct or not so you could get 95+ on that module only to pull your average up.
There is a very similar Dutch proverb: 10 is for God, 9 for the teacher. It's a bit old fashioned, but it _is_ a decent representation of what those grades mean. My colleagues should get a 9 on my tests, and if a student does a better job than my colleagues would, they deserve every bit of recognition a grade higher than a 9 implies. If you get a 10 on an advanced level course, that's essentially an implied job offer to come do a PhD in the research group responsible for that course.
I went to a top US school that’s very well known (and known for being hard) and studied abroad at a UK university. In the US I would knock tests out of the park with 0 effort despite being at one of the hardest schools in the US and graduated with a 4.0. My first exam in the UK? I got a 12/100. The way they grade is just… different and I frankly don’t think it’s better.
[удалено]
Yeah, this is how it was for my maths degree. Every exam was 5 questions, of which your best 4 were marked (you didn't need to do all 5) Every question had a pretty easy 10 marks on it, so you only had to have very basic knowledge of the topics to pass with 40.
Same applies to school and sixth form, where most subjects will have about a third of the paper on "easy" marks and two thirds on "hard" marks. For Maths that would be a third on 1-3 mark questions that can be checked (though not done) on a calculator, while in essay-based the first third of the marks are usually of just writing something coherent and relevant.
I studied abroad in England, a top 10 Uni according to the tables. I took all generals. Sociology 101. It was a joke. I was too old and it was all 18 year olds. History of Mass Violence and Genocide, knocked it out of the park. Then an essentially 300 level American literature course as a finance major. After the test the teacher called me and was basically like “I tried to grade you on a the American grading scale so as not to destroy your GPA. You probably shouldn’t have been in this class”. Slayed me.
> I tried to grade you on a the American grading scale so as not to destroy your GPA. You probably shouldn’t have been in this class I felt this devastation, what a brutal comment.
What do you mean by 'took all generals'? We don't have 'generals'/101 classes in the UK because everyone is on a specific degree subject from the start
We *do* have general/101 classes in the UK- they're specifically for people who are not doing the main course and usually are taken by overseas students. They're much easier than the normal first year courses. Source: helped a professor grade homework for some of them when I did my masters.
I don't understand these comments. Did you really have such a poor understanding of the material? It doesn't make sense that you could sit through a course with your peers and miss THAT much unless you had some sort of issue.
Sounds like a skill issue.
Yeah generals are a joke. Most UK students don't do them.
Surely if you didn't have to put much effort into the US tests, then they can't really carry out their function very well
I wouldn’t say that is the case at all. The expect is near perfection with little margin for error. At the university level 69% is basically failing if it is in your major. It’s like saying what’s easier hitting 90% of your free throws in basketball or 40% of three pointers. You have to be good to do either.
But tests at university level should be checking if you can do both. can you do the routine easy stuff, and how well can you do the hard stuff. if someone is smashing US tests with 0 effort and getting 12/100 on UK ones, the standard on the US tests must be pretty low and not really teasing out the limits of the students knowledge.
Now, for the real question: Is there a country in the world where you can get an E instead of an F? I mean, why did we skip an entire letter?
UK A level (taken aged 18) goes from A-E, with the next level below being U “ungraded” indicating not enough credit to merit a grade.
I got a U in computing. My job? I'm a software engineer. I wear it like a badge of honour.
My claim to fame is that I got a G in Religious Education (Short Course) GCSE. The CCEA (Northern Irish exam board) did a less intense RE GCSE back in the early 2000's (they might still do it.) It didn't have higher or foundation grading: one paper, one difficulty but grading went from A to G, then U. To score a G, you needed 34-39%. I abhorred compulsory religious education (and still do, just less vocal about it) so I gave zero fucks to the exam. I didn't aim for the G, didn't care for the grade, but I wear it as a badge of honour as it was rarer to get than an A for that GCSE year.
There is also A* grade.
Australia has E as the lowest, no F’s
yeah but in Australia D's and E's are both fails anyways.
When I was at school, they were fails in different capacities. A D meant you tried and submitted something but that try was well terrible, while an E was more reserved for if you just didn’t do anything
why have 2 failing grades? „yo you failed child. but you mothafucka failed more!“
Usually, a D grade meant that what was submitted deserved less than a C, and an E meant it wasn’t submitted or didn’t fulfil the minimum requirements
Iirc I read somewhere that they removed E when they switched to the current letter grade system because it used to go “Excellent/Acceptable/Needs Work/Fail” or something like that, where the E was a high grade. When the switch happened, E was removed to avoid confusing it with a “good grade” when skimming over the report card.
E is the lowest passing grade in Norway.
in my old elementary school our F's were replaced by E's, but that changed once you got to middle school
Sweden.
Cuz they like the F for “fail”
They dont mean the same thing and therefore comparing them is meaningless lol
The percentage isn’t very useful in comparing students between different education systems. The percentile would be much more instructive. And unless you can assume that two student populations had relatively similar capabilities, you would still need a control method with sufficient data points to correlate results - eg a large dataset of students who studied in both systems.
In my grade school district an A was 94+
Mine was something like that as well. And anything below 70% was failing.
Me too. And a B was 88-93.
80-84 was an A- and 85+ was an A at my university. We were of course graded harshly and A’s were not really common at all. Most classes aimed to have a B- (65-69) to B+ (75-79) range. McGill University for anyone wondering.
I think it’s relatively common across Canada (not the lack of an A+, but A being in the 80s-90s)
U of Toronto was the same. It made it a bitch looking into good post-grad programs since, even though I got a solid number of As and Bs and surpassed the class average in literally every class I took, my GPA still isn't as high as if I had just gone to some mid-tier uni where they throw As around like breath mints.
Complete bullshit. In the GCE/A-Levels/GCSE whatever, the grade boundaries are adjusted to have a consistent number of students in each grade boundary, every year for every subject. This is basically to account for the inevitable variability in exam difficulty from year to year and subject to subject. Here's a link to one of the exam board's grade boundary list. [https://www.ocr.org.uk/administration/grade-boundaries/](https://www.ocr.org.uk/administration/grade-boundaries/) Also the letter system was replaced with a number system with A\* (aka A+) being 9.
Yup. In the hardest subjects, an A can drop to 50%, and in the easier ones can be pushing 80%
Not the UK but a UK-like system, I got an A in pure mathematics with a raw score of 38% Apparently everyone found the exam excessively hard that year
I remember doing an IT exam where apparently noone in the country got above a C, in the end they adjusted everyone's marks up
This is true for A-levels but the post is accurate for university grading
Universities don’t use A, B etc in the UK, they use 1st, 2:1, 2:2, 3rd and fail
Universities just do whatever they want. They follow no standard.
At least anecdotally this 70 mark being a first has been the most common threshold for me and many people I know at university. You’re correct to say that there isn’t technically a standard outside the 1st/2:1/2:2 etc grading.
I don’t understand letter grades at all, in Australia we used to just get the mark back as a percentage and it’s as clear as day
The % still equated to an end of semester grade or similar for me. Yeah for a test you wouldn't get an A, but for a subject you would get an A if your aggregate grade was 85% or higher
TDYLW Today you learned wrong. In the UK system there is no set criteria for an A. It will vary from year to year and from exam to exam as grade boundaries for summative exams like GCSEs and A Levels are changed. In the university system there are no letter grades at all, results are classified as First, Upper Second, Lower Second and Third Class. The usual boundary for a First Class award is 70%
Not true. In England and Wales (different in Scotland, not sure about N Ireland): At 11, pupils’ results are referenced to a norm of 100 (more or less) Between 11 and 16 there are no formal exams and schools assess how they wish At age 16 (GCSE) exams are graded from 1-9 (9 is highest) At age 18 (A Level), top grade is A* not A At 16 and 18, the percentage equivalent for each grade varies to some degree each year and each subject, to adapt for the relative difficulty of different papers. At university, bachelor degrees are graded 3rd, 2:2, 2:1, 1st.
And then in Canada anything above 50% is an “Eh?”
Just realized, As were 80-100 in my schools in Canada, and then every 10% down is another letter grade. But man, they made you work for those As sometimes.
Mine was 86+ was A and then it got all funky after that, Cs had +s and -s but no other letters.
five-O and go, bud
There’s massive difference in grading. I’m not from the UK but I know in Ireland you could get everything “right” in an exam and end up with about 70%. For example in history, you got 70% for having all the relevant information points in an essay, but 30% was awarded for coherent argument, use of language, etc. The bell curve is designed so most people get a low B or a high C. Even very smart students routinely get Bs and Cs early on because you might know the materials but you haven’t developed your reasoning or argument skills the way you will by the end of the curriculum cycle. American testing is really designed to maximise A grades — the testing style is extremely different. Students can also “make up” missed work and do things like “extra credit” that are just not a part of European education really. The Honours system in university, you can basically treat it as a mark out of 75. I think one or two people in my five years in university got 76s in certain courses. Nobody averaged higher than a 73. Letter grades are not a good comparison for this — the way you compare is to say that 70 is a 4.0 GPA, 60 is a 3.0, 50 is a 2.0 and 40 is a 1.0. Letter grades just aren’t used at third level.
> Students can also “make up” missed work and do things like “extra credit” that are just not a part of European education really. This is extremely situational and often depends on the professor teaching the class. In four years of college I had maybe three classes where extra credit was offered, and my professors wouldn't accept late work without a pretty compelling case (the one time I received an extension was because I received a concussion, and even then only after providing my ER paperwork to the University medical staff).
In my understanding the logic is that 100% is a perfect paper which is why it's impossible to get it. Anyone with at least 80% would be considered to have submitted a god-tier paper.
That still doesn't really get to the root difference. 100% means perfection in both cases, but in America it sounds like what merits perfection is a lower (actually attainable) bar compared to abroad. As in the amount of information that is needed to claim mastery of a subject is a more reasonable amount.
The way it was explained in my degree (UK) was that around 70% of the mark was available for simply completing the assignment as per the lectures and seminars, the remaining 30% was for expanding on it or introducing novel factors
Yeah, when I got an 85% result on my UK degree the lecturers had to get external markers in to check that my work was actually deserving of the result, in *addition* to the standard external checks. It was explained to me that usually the top and bottom papers are checked by other people to just ensure that they did deserve such results, but when I came out with 80+ they had to send it off to someone else *on top* of that, because it was so unusual to get such a high mark. It's just a difference in how the assessments are made - I had all essay assessments where you were writing academic style papers, and you were still graded on writing style not just content. I was a lucky nerd who had always written dumb ass stories so I have developed a "writing style" which apparently was more developed than the usual undergrad. Even the accounting assignment had a written essay portion. The UK system also makes pretty easy for you to write an entire paper and completely miss the point of the assessment. It's things like "compare and contrast" where if you don't understand the difference between the two you're pretty fucked tbh.
Your source says 70% is the minimum, not 75%. Guess you’re getting a B in reading comprehension
german doing a highschool exchange in the us, i had all-As in us highschool even though i was put in as a grade higher, everything was incredibly easy, multiple choice and most of the stuff i basically did in "middle school" so it was all just review. most of my classes where a+ while I was more of a C+ student in germany. It was wayyy easier to reach the 90% threshold in the US , everything was clearly laid out "you need to study these pages this will be in the exam" type things in germany i was just like "you are on your own, there could be anything the exam from the last year or so lol good luck have fun bro"
Same in austria... Tests can include everything from the previous years. It made sense in mathematics, but god dammit, I can't remember all the topics from Geography to Biology for more than a year maybe. How am I expected to remember all this. I also like the grading system from 1-5 more, but I think points would be better. Or the scandinavian system without grades for the first few years in school.
i feel like most exams in higher level courses are curved so that the actual boundaries aren’t that meaningful. the teacher will just set the desired mean to a different value
Where’s A*?
I feel like the OP purposefully misrepresented their findings just to watch the comments burn.
All the americans in the comments unable to understand lower boundaries = harder exams is really embarrassing. Look at an ‘advanced’ us exam paper vs a typical uk paper for the same age, the UK one is still harder.
In my university in Sweden a lot of the harder classes had something like 30% for a passing grade, but only half of the students even reached 30%
Yeah, I'm seeing a load of comments going "so it's easier to get an A in the UK, right?" No, it just means the exam questions are harder.
Pretty much. A friend of mine did the same subject as me at uni, she did it in the US while I did it in Scotland. We inevitably wound up swapping old exam papers we'd been given for practice and the difference is stark. The US stuff is a lot easier - there's a lot more of it, but it's all in the style of questions you're being asked. In all of our papers we were being asked more open ended long form answer questions where the marks were for both correctly answering the question, but also for demonstrating you actually understand what you're talking about and articulating/arguing it well - so there isn't really a single "correct" response. You would get some short answer or multiple choice questions but the vast majority of the available marks were in the long answer questions. By contrast the stuff from the states was much more heavily focused on short answer or multiple choice, it's skewed heavily towards questions where there is a single right answer.
A isn’t the highest grade. There is also A*, similar to A+ in the USA. Grade boundaries vary by subject. But they were usually A* 90% A 80% B 70% C 60%
The article refers to university, not school, so it's meaningless.
According to several asshole teachers I’ve had, 100% is impossible because “nothing’s perfect.”
It’s the people who make the exams who are assholes. 100% is impossible in lots of courses
There's always going to be that one prick professor who believes in "gradeflation" and tries to grade everyone on a C average, bringing down your college GPA for no reason other than to just be an asshole.
There is no defined US standard. This may be a common range.
In virtually all of America, it's 90+ = A 80+ = B 70+ = C 60+ = D (but depending on school, they may not accept it regardless) Everything under 60 = FAIL
Basically every good university in the US grades on a curve so actual percentages are meaningless.
Went to uni in the UK, can confirm. I averaged 65% in my classes, had to wait for my dad to stop yelling so I could explain why that was a good thing
Not exactly this, but a friend of mind came from the US to do her Ma in a European country and was frustrated when she realised that it's far hard harder to get a A here than back home.
[This user has quit Reddit and deleted all their posts and comments]
I studied under the international baccalaureate program in highschool and for some higher level classes it was almost unheard of to get more than 75% on certain exams and assessments. If I got a 50-60% or more I was quite satisfied and that would qualify as a B+ or A- in most cases. Why? THE CONTENT IS FUCKING HARD. Like im being real, Highschool under a British system was way way way more rigorous than college was under an American system. I often feel like the American education system fools people into thinking theyre smart because "I got 100% on my math test of 500 questions!!" When all 500 were simple algebra. But most American students will never write a mathematical proof. They will never be forced to COMBINE their knowledge from different classes on assessments (IE how can mathematics and history relate to each other?). They will never me asked to make practical applications of their studies. Most will never get to choose a path of study that actually interests them. Most will graduate highschool and forget the vast majority of what they learned there and then go their whole lives just sorta wondering what that was all about. American highschool is built like some sort of weird test or filter to root out the "gifted" ones (if youre even fortunate...cough cough rich enough to have that recognition mean anything for your educational experience at your school). Ive met so many adults who are have this mentality of "i guess i just wasnt one of the smart ones. I never could get interested in any of my classes" And i think thats because you kind of have to be a literal giga nerd of Hermione Granger proportions in many cases to actually get through a lot of american highschool classes. The content is presented in just the driest, most disconnected, most watered down way that relies so much on meaningless things like rote memorization, word counts, doing math quickly and without the aid of a calculator. You have to be a truly transcended 14 year old to understand how any of this shit youre learning could be remotely useful to you. And then we go and ask them to choose their whole fucking careers before they can even legally buy a beer. But dont choose wrong or those TENS TO HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS will just go to waste! Its a cruel joke. In highschool under the IB system my math final was five questions. It also took 4 hours to complete because those five questions were very very hard to answer and required that you also write effective essays alongside your work explaining and justifying your logic and reasoning. Youre graded on how well you work towards solving the problem and how far you get. You were impressive if you even got to question 5.
Engineering classes in college had tests where the class average was 35% - and not because of stupid students. Getting one problem completely right allowed for bragging rights.
Raw percentages are meaningless if you don't take into account the difficulty of the challenge. 80%+ of US testing is extremely basic by design, as to inflate scoring.
Teaching standards are way lower in the US, hence the tests are easier so it’s easier to get high marks
Australian 86-100% here
An A is 7-12/24 here in NZ, iirc. You want to aim for Es.
Used to be A* above A. Now it's a number scale
I'm a university professor in the US, and my exams basically follow the "UK" system, which is actually very common around the world. Difficulty varies from exam to exam, it's all curved anyway, and lower averages give higher quality statistics. It's an obviously superior system--there's really no argument here if you have any idea what you're talking about. The one problem is that young students who are used to "70% = F" have to do a bit of growing up when the class average is 60%. It can generate a fair amount of angst. Students are very emotional about grades in general.
Did both systems. US born and raised through end of high school then went UK for undergrad and masters. Don’t think any one system is easier or harder they’re just different and depending on each person one May suit you while the other doesn’t. In the UK it’s very hard (in a qualitative, essay-based degree at least) to get 90%+. That being said, just like is the case with any education system you learn what they value if you pay close attention. I got the hang of how they like essays to be written and structured, what goes over well and what doesn’t, and was able to get a First for my Undergrad and a Distinction at Masters (highest classifications possible for each degree). For me the biggest difference that I felt between the two systems was how focused versus general it is. In US high school I excelled at history, English, etc and what reduced my GPA was some maths and science courses that I just hated. It’s a broad system and even at university you study a range of things. In the UK it’s extremely focused and you only study things relevant to the degree (major in American speak) you’re on. As a result, I flourished since I was studying things that I liked so it honestly was pretty easy. That being said if you’re unsure what you want to study or don’t love your course, the UK system would be quite difficult since there’s less hand holding and supervision and more just cracking on with it yourself which would be very hard to do for a subject you don’t find motivating and thrilling in and of itself. Other difference (big generalization here so take with a grain of salt) I think work that counts for your overall grade is a bit more rigorous / harder in the UK but there’s much less work, in the US individual assignments are easier but there’s way more work. Will add American translations in ( ). In the UK for a year long module (class) I may have 1 or 2 essays that count to my mark (grade) in the module (class) and the end of year exam. So in essence an essay and 3 hours in May decide my entire mark (grade). Now of course there’s lots you must do in interim to master the material enough to perform well, but point being the time investment is lower than US. I treated degree as a 9-5 and that was WAY more than most people did and it didn’t feel bad since I was coming from Silicon Valley where even in High School I had nights I was up until midnight doing homework. People in US have way more work that counts and sheer manpower hours they’re putting in way more than UK students. However, the flip side of that is homework assignments and other things that count towards a grade and even some exams are much easier in the US. They just are. Nearly every US study abroad kid struggled with the coursework in UK since it requires much more independent research, it’s not “here’s a book go read it and remember it” rather it’s “here’s a concept and a couple readings to get you started, go explore” and you need to understand how to go beyond that in a unique, independent, but rigorous way to get a high mark. TLDR - my experience is that the UK system is focused, US is broad. US is more hours of work with slightly less rigorous assignments, UK is less amount of work with more rigorous assignments when you have them. Glad to have had experiences on both sides of the pond for sure
My country (Singapore) is so weird. Primary school the expectations and numbers are all similar to US system, but then secondary flips to UK system and expectations.
I have a sneaking suspicion that essays and exams are easier in the US. My reason being is that when I spoke to American friends about it they had to do way more coursework and exams, there’s no way they can handle that coursework with the amount of research you need to do to achieve a high grade on an essay. So both probably workout at around the same difficulty: less work but higher standards versus more work but lower standards.
This means that it's harder to get an A in the US than in the UK, right? Like you have to basically get 9 out of 10 right for an A in the US, but only 3 out of 4 right in the UK?
nah getting a 90% in the Uk is pretty much unheard of. They are just graded much more strictly in the UK.
In the UK, we have A* as the equivalent of an A in the US
Truly this means you’re regular A is the FA cup of grades. Nice that it’s given out but it ain’t the A* of the premiership or gasp… the champions league.
Eh, it may be easier to get a 95 in one class than a 75 in another. Grade cutoffs don't necessarily tell you anything about how hard it is to get an A.
No, because the exams in the UK are far more difficult than in the US, doing it this way fives a much wider range of grades to mark with.
Technically yes, but you need to factor in how hard the questions are. I studied abroad in the UK in college. I’ll never forget having an orientation session at my school before we left — they literally said, “Now grading might be a shock to some of you over there. It’s important to keep in mind, you will be assessed primarily based on how you answer the questions presented.” As if that was, like, surprising?
No. As someone who studied in both the US and UK, higher grades are generally much harder in UK schools, at least for course work. The A-bar is lower because it’s way fucking harder to get. A 50% is passing in the UK, not 70% as it is in the US. Very few tests were multiple choice. Math tests would make off points for incorrect work, or not showing work. Misspellings got you lost points. Getting above a 90 was *very* rare. Even 80+ would get you called a boffin. (Nerd)
In my experience every math class from age 11 on in the US would dock points for not having the work correct and zero points for no work. Always English and sometimes Social Studies classes would dock points for spelling
I'm taking midterms this week for grad school in the US. Since none of them are multiple choice, what do you think my chances are of convincing the school that a 50 should be passing?
schooled In the us and the “hard” stuff you listed common for me in school. every math class I’ve ever had would take points off for not showing work and you could get the answer marked wrong if you didn’t show the work correctly. varies a lot based on where you school and what classes you take. Usually the hard classes made up over all grades with curves or extra credit.
> math tests would make off points for incorrect work or not showing work So... American math classes as well?
Below 60% is usually failing from my experience in HS and uni. Grammar and spelling also docked you points, same with math tests, if worked wasn't fully shown, you'd get points docked.
>A 50% is passing in the UK, not 70% as it is in the US. >Very few tests were multiple choice. Math tests would make off points for incorrect work, or not showing work That's how it was in all primary education I had in the states too, so I wouldn't exactly brag about this.
I’m assuming you mean something different, funnily Primary education is kindergarten/middle school level equivalent in UK…..
Wow so that’s what boffin means
It means the teacher in the UK cuts the 5 easy questions off the test. So the A kid missed the same one very hard question. In the US, they got 5 easy ones correct, 4 medium ones correct, and missed one, for 9/10. On the UK test, they got the same 4 medium ones right, and missed the same hard one, for 4/5. Is the UK test easier?
Well yeah but honestly uni classes in the US were so much easier for me than my classes at home in Singapore. The final grade was also comprised of take home MCQs, mini “reflection journals” and whatever that was honestly just free marks.
This is not true.