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>The registrar approved a grade change to "A", because the university does not give grades higher than "A". It’s hilarious to me that the bureaucracy of this u
by shadowoflight 7y ago
>The registrar approved a grade change to "A", because the university does not give grades higher than "A".
It’s hilarious to me that the bureaucracy of this university couldn’t allow even a single grade above an A in this exceptional circumstance - I wonder if it actually came down to some hard limit in their grade keeping system, or if some grumpy recordskeeper just said, “Nope, this is how we’ve always done things, so this is how we will always do things.”
- watwut 7y agoIn all seriousness, the profs cant just invent grades that don't exist. Verbal "awesome work from X everybody read it" is for that purpose. This is not some kind of overreach of bureaucracy.
- crawfordcomeaux 7y agoIn all seriousness, the profs can choose to do what they want and the system most certainly can choose to allow it or not. This is absolutely an example of rigid bureaucracy at work. Also, you now are eligible for grade changes in past English classes because you used the word "can't" figuratively to describe a literal situation. Whether the grade changes occur and if they go up or down is up to the systems maintaining the grades and the teachers.
- watwut 7y agoNext level grade inflation "A+++", "totally awesome A", "A totally even more awesome then A+++:. In all seriousness, this is not rigid bureaucracy preventing something that would be useful. Just because prof have such an emotional reaction to someones unusual effort does not mean new grade has a reason to exist.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoI guess it depends on the grading system doesn't it? I mean, if the top mark is essentially 100% to mean "there's nothing that reasonably could have been done to improve it" and A is defined as 80-100, then you can't to better than A. Or if the top mark is 1.0 and the worst passing mark is 4.0, and A means 1.0, then you can't do better than A. They already went way outside, above and beyond anything I could've imagined. How do you change a grade decades after the course? Surely they're locked down soon after. To me, just going off and making it an A (rather than the professor just saying "well I've got egg on my face don't I?") is already incredible and a generous deviation from the bureaucracy.
- crawfordcomeaux 7y agoOh absolutely! I simply want to challenge the disempowering language of bureaucracy that involves saying someone "can't" do something. There's literally an infinite number of ways to adapt the system to allow for a higher-than-A grade. Choosing to not do it is still a choice. I'm not claiming they should've done anything different. I'm merely making sure bureaucracy's responsibility in this matter is pinned down.
- watwut 7y ago"I can't do it" is pretty much normal way how to convey not just it is physically impossible. It normally means: * It is not up to me to decide that, it would be overreaching my mandate to make that change. * This is against my moral values. * This is against rules that everyone else bothered to follow. All these are valid choices and right choices. The bureaucracy responsibility in cases like this is literally to resist the pressure to make exception just so someone feels good.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- shadowoflight 7y agoThe +/- letter grading scale has existed for as long as I can remember. For the particular college I attended, A+ corresponded to a GPA of 4.33 or a % score of >100 and was only given out to exemplary students - I believe this case would certainly be worthy of that extremely high grade.
- MikeTheGreat 7y ago4.333333333333333333? Bah! That's grade-inflation, pure and simple. In my day, the grades topped out at cough4.0. Back in my day, a 4.0 coughreally meant somethingcough, not like these cough hold on, I gotta re-up my inhaler- Ok, where was I? Oh, right - Get off my lawn! :)
- watwut 7y agoThe case got highest grade available in system that this particular college uses. There is not reason to expand the scale.
- emptyfile 7y agoMaybe its my European mindset but I find it impossible to believe that any school can just start inventing extra grades.
- coldtea 7y agoMaybe it's my southern European mindset, but I find it totally possible. The world is not as rigid as northern Europe thinks it is...
- emptyfile 7y agoI'm from the Balkans.
- coldtea 7y agoWell, if you're from the Balkans you should surely see it as totally possible! Far more rule and law-bending is happening than that, for the possibility of "inventing a new grade" to be really impossible/surprising.
- coldtea 7y agoCase in point, I know a university case where the professor body wanted to appoint their "own" candidate for a professorship position. The dean and several (majority) professors had already agreed under the table, and the few others didn't matter. The only problem was they legally had to go through a open contest for the position. So when someone came up with 5x the qualifications (citations, papers, conferences, better universities attended, etc, globally too) than their ho-hum friend (some relative of the dean), the professor body suddenly folded the position. A few months later, they announced a new opening, with some specially crafted qualifications, so that only their friend could pass.
- dantondwa 7y agoI can really see this happening, unfortunately, and I actually did many times. However, Southern bureaucracies are flexible only when they shouldn't be and insurmountably rigid when it's actually good, reasonable, or funny to make an exception. So, no, no extra grade for Watson here. But we might as well create a whole new professional category for the friend of my friend.
- lallysingh 7y agoProbably breaks some column constraints.
- pryffwyd 7y agoDefinitely. Adding an extra grade I'm sure would require at least a couple hours of technical work and haunt subsystems and stats analysts for decades to come. Not worth it.
- lbatista 7y agoI like the 19/20 French system. Numberphile has a nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzrRkhU248A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzrRkhU248A
- ska 7y agoFWIW I remember a (peoplesoft, iirc) roll out that was so painful that certain departments changed their entire course numbering and taxonomy system, because that was easier than teaching the software new tricks.
- leetcrew 7y agothe school's database may not store strings like "A", "B+", etc. I'd guess it stores grade points, which can be more directly used to calculate GPA. so at schools where A is the highest grade, it is already represented by 4.0. it's probably more trouble than it's worth to accommodate values outside this range just to symbolically correct a grade several decades later.