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For curiosity's sake, how many percent of the students taking a typical college course in math or physics typically receive the grade A? (As you might guess, I'

by Aqwis 15y ago

For curiosity's sake, how many percent of the students taking a typical college course in math or physics typically receive the grade A? (As you might guess, I'm not American.)

nice1 15y ago
This has changed over the years; it is heading for 100% I believe.
khermitian 15y ago
It varies by school and professor. I know several big schools suffer from grade inflation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#Grade_Inflation_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#Grade_Inflation... In general, I think its usually a average of a B, at least at Northwestern University, but other people might have different experiences.
- Aqwis 15y ago
  Thanks. For the record, the average grades for the courses at my university tend to be Cs (in the case of the big introductory courses, the average is usually closer to a D than a B), with about 10% of the students receiving As. This discrepancy is quite unintuitive; (intuitively) you'd expect that the grade "A" means about the same thing in two different university systems that use letter grades.
  - khermitian 15y ago
    My experience above is from discussions with professors in higher level classes. Im not too sure if that applies to intro levels. I think that once you reach a certain level of difficultly the grade does not really reflect how well you learn the material, but more of how ridiculously smart everyone else in the class is (see that most of the test averages come out to about 50% or less).
tokenadult 15y ago
I'm not sure how well the most comprehensive set of national statistics in the United States http://gradeinflation.com/ http://gradeinflation.com/ disaggregates statistics for students who pursue different majors. The college reported in the blog post submitted here, the University of Oregon, http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=3264&profileId=6 http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j... has an incoming class of students whose SAT and ACT score interquartile ranges are at about the national median for the college 25th percentile. There are not a lot of conspicuously high-scoring students at that college, so the study submitted here has the issue of restriction of range.
redwood 15y ago
At big competitive public schools where there's no grade inflation and grades are held to a curve, like Berkeley for example, perhaps 15% receive A's, 40% receive B's, 35% receive C's etc

by Aqwis 15y ago

For curiosity's sake, how many percent of the students taking a typical college course in math or physics typically receive the grade A? (As you might guess, I'm not American.)

nice1 15y ago

This has changed over the years; it is heading for 100% I believe.

khermitian 15y ago

It varies by school and professor. I know several big schools suffer from grade inflation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#Grade_Inflation_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#Grade_Inflation... In general, I think its usually a average of a B, at least at Northwestern University, but other people might have different experiences.

Aqwis 15y ago
Thanks. For the record, the average grades for the courses at my university tend to be Cs (in the case of the big introductory courses, the average is usually closer to a D than a B), with about 10% of the students receiving As. This discrepancy is quite unintuitive; (intuitively) you'd expect that the grade "A" means about the same thing in two different university systems that use letter grades.
- khermitian 15y ago
  My experience above is from discussions with professors in higher level classes. Im not too sure if that applies to intro levels. I think that once you reach a certain level of difficultly the grade does not really reflect how well you learn the material, but more of how ridiculously smart everyone else in the class is (see that most of the test averages come out to about 50% or less).

tokenadult 15y ago

I'm not sure how well the most comprehensive set of national statistics in the United States http://gradeinflation.com/ http://gradeinflation.com/ disaggregates statistics for students who pursue different majors. The college reported in the blog post submitted here, the University of Oregon, http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.jsp?collegeId=3264&profileId=6 http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j... has an incoming class of students whose SAT and ACT score interquartile ranges are at about the national median for the college 25th percentile. There are not a lot of conspicuously high-scoring students at that college, so the study submitted here has the issue of restriction of range.

redwood 15y ago

At big competitive public schools where there's no grade inflation and grades are held to a curve, like Berkeley for example, perhaps 15% receive A's, 40% receive B's, 35% receive C's etc