Everyone knows the feeling of missing one too many questions on a math quiz, agonizing for days over the resulting 89.3 percent and begging the teacher to bump it up, only to end up with a B in the class.
If GPA was calculated on a scale of 0-100, rather than the 4-point scale, students wouldn’t have to fret over the one percent between an 89 and a 90. Essentially, letter grades would be a thing of the past.
Letter grades are arbitrary. While Whitman uses the standard A, B, C, D system, some schools use plus-and-minus systems, which further refine grades. Some schools cut an A- off at a 90 percent, while others consider it to be a 92 percent. Other schools vary their letter grade percentages by class, so that an 80 percent may be a B- in an art class but as high as an A in an AP class.
A percentage system might put more stress on students–students would actually have to get a 100% to have a “perfect” GPA. However, in a culture of overachievers, too many students get all As or Bs for colleges to use these standards. Colleges should be able to pick out the students who excel in their classes with 98-100 percents. If every valedictorian of every high school in the United States, most of which who get near-perfect, if not perfect straight As, applied to an Ivy League school, they couldn’t all be accepted.
An 89 percent receives a B which could have been as low as a 79.5 percent, while a 90 percent receives an A which could have been as high as a 100 percent. In most cases, an 89 percent takes more work than a 79.5 percent, but they are currently assigned the same number of points towards one’s GPA because of letter grades. One percent is one percent, and under a system with no letter grades, the difference between an 89 and a 90 would be reflected as such.
Grades are meant to be an objective measure of student achievement in school, but in order to be accurate, they need to be reported straight up, not through arbitrary letters. Maybe it’s just me being bitter over an 89.3 percent in AP world, but I think us students should get credit for every percentage point we work for.
