Kids grading scales are super lenient these days! I told my 15-year old that he’s very lucky…“in my day” any grade in the 70’s would have been a D. Today, depending on where that 70 falls, it could be a C OR EVEN A B!!!
He didn’t believe it…so I found my high school grades which had the Marking System “legend” printed on them.
I showed it to him and he couldn’t believe it. This is what it looked like when I was in high school.
Wow, that is really different from what I know. I don’t remember grades having changed over the years (and if you count elementary school, I’ve been in school nearly continuously for 30 years…!).
Here’s a Wikipedia article about Canadian grades. We can pass a course at 50%, it seems (if a D is a pass, I’m not sure if it is). And 86% is an A for us and a C for you!!
Of course, one compensatory difference may be that I consider a grade of C or B to be rather mediocre most of the time. I strive for As, and there are only rare circumstances where I consider a C or B acceptable (basically if I take a course without asking for disability accommodations, which I’ve done several times, I’m happy with any pass).
I have a 4.0 (higher but our scale only accounted for 4.0) through all my college but my high school grades were not pretty. I set out to make all As to prove to my kids that it’s possible if you really want it.
Yeah, my high school grades weren’t great, mostly because I just didn’t really care about grades (although I was very studious, but I felt some teachers were really unfair in their grading). In college and university, my grades were not straight As for the first few years, then picked up as I honed in on the field that really motivated me. It’s funny, I was never much interested in things like languages, math, and science during high school (lowest grades by far), but now that I’m done formal education until if/when I do a Ph.D., I’m suddenly interested in picking up skills in those areas and have been taking evening courses. I figure I’ll be one of those people who’s in school my entire life until I die at 101. 
We have a very different grading scale that runs from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best grade and grades >5.5 or >6 being a pass. However, a 5.5 doesn’t necessarily correspond to 55%, since this isn’t standardized. Schools or teachers themselves can decide how lenient they want to be.
The grading system for nationwide final high school exams is standardized, but every year the ‘national exam institute’ adjusts the scale according to the overall performance in order to correct for the difficulty of the exams. If an exam turns out to be easier than previous years, they’ll set the bar higher or lower if necessary. So even then you don’t know on beforehand what percentage will be a pass.
This is the same grading scale I had in high school and college. Of course, some tests were graded on a curve too – I had one class (I believe it was solids in Mech E) where the average score on a test was a 31 – and I got a 75 so it was like an A+++.
But of course they didn’t curve down. Like if you got a 90 on a test and everyone else got a 100 you wouldn’t get a C, you’d still get an A.
Well that works both ways, my father got unlucky with a curve teacher and had a genius in his class. The curve was set off the highest score. I think my father got a 42 which was the second highest grade in the class, but because the genius got 98, everyone else failed. 
Grades policies giveth, and they taketh,
I don’t recall any curving of grades during my high school years. You got what you got.
This was an upper level college course in physics in the early 60’s. So not as black and white as your high school, but pretty brutal by any measure. Only course my father failed in college. Otherwise got straight A’s. He wears the failure as a badge, although I seem to remember their being talk of kneecapping the guy.
Oy, now I really feel old… When I was in school, 90%> = A, 80-89% = B, 70-79% = C, 60-69%=D (not a passing grade), and <60% was a complete compulsory course redo.
That’s what my grading scale was in the late 90s/early 00s. With some pluses and minuses in the mix. I refuse to be considered old, so you must not be either 
There were no pluses or minuses in my school grading either. Just straight letter grades.
All As was a 4.0, all Bs was a 3.0 GPA and down from there.
I graduated in 1991.
Thanks @Katers87! I will accept your superior insight as fact. 
BTW, when I was in HS, we stole the “Welcome to Ocean City MD” sign and hung it on our school auditorium as a school prank. One of many in fact that we narrowly escaped going to jail for.
My HS grading was similar to this, but with extra credit, could get an H (Outstanding), which was higher than A (Excellent).
We also got a number rating, 1-4, for conduct and effort.
A-3-2 might mean teacher thought you could do better, B-1-1 meant you were doing the best you could.
You graduated high school in 1991. I feel old too (I graduated in 1978).
But the difficulty of the questions/problems and the number of difficult questions/problems is completely arbitrary and decided by the teachers… so I don’t think you can really compare grading systems between different locations or between different time periods.
I disagree. There aren’t any new “topics” and the difficulty of Algebra II, for instance, is the same today as it was when I was a kid. No new mathematical discoveries that have given any new insights that would make the topic anymore difficult. Also, history hasn’t changed to my knowledge. And the teachers (at least to my knowledge) have always had guidelines that they had to follow (state required) and although these have most assuredly changed, I would say the same things are still being taught in much the same ways it was being taught when I was in school.
I will admit that they are creating convoluted ways these days to do simple math (such as the “box method”).
I would have thought you were right, but seeing my kindergartener learning “number bonds” for addition and subtraction has made me realize just how faddish even basic subject matter education is.
Yeah, that’s what I was saying about these convoluted methods they’re using these days for simple things like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It took me about an hour for my elementary son to explain how to some “method” for division…and I was just like…WHY???
But the higher you go in Math, the more things seem to have stayed the same. My high school son, although he’s doing AP Calculus now and I’m lost…last year and the year before that he was in Algebra and I was following what he was doing in those courses because I remembered it (the FOIL Method, for instance, is still “In”)
I hope they didn’t get rid of PEMDAS!