• dreadgoat@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    US schools definitely mess with your head the higher of an achiever you are.

    In remedial classes, in most places, 60 is passing.
    In normal classes, in most places, 70 is passing.
    In advanced classes, you may be kicked out for scoring under 80.

    The intuitive concept of “barely good enough” keeps getting higher as you perform better, plus of course each of these types of classes are progressively more difficult by their nature. It really fucks with people who are excellent in some subjects but average in others.

    • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      In all my normal classes, 60 was the cutoff for passing. In my advanced classes it was 80. Never saw a 70 cutoff though.

    • yetAnotherUser@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Is that percentage of points or just an arbitrary grade scale?

      Because that’s quite funny compared to the (non-US) university I attend where you pass the difficult classes with “just” 33% of points.

      • atomicorange@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Percentage of points. So if you get half of the questions wrong on a test, you fail. In some cases, teachers will grade “on a curve”, meaning they normalize the class scores. My organic chem teacher in college liked to make extremely difficult tests, so you’d get 40% or something awful like that and it would turn out that nobody in the class scored over 50% so you actually got an A.