Grading Scale

[tina.easley]

This might sound like a stupid question....but what is everyone's experience with grading scales in your nursing classes? The school I was attending, and am currently trying to get back into, started out with our gen eds and had a normal grading scale of a C being 70% and then second term came around and all of a sudden we were told that since we were starting nursing courses a C is now an 80%. I was just wondering if this is a normal occurrence.

-Tina

[jellybeany]

Yes, sadly. 80% is a C, and to get an A we must have a 94%!

[Mike R, ADN, BSN, RN]

A = 90-100

B = 82-89.9

C = 75-79.9

At ours. There was a thread on this somewhere where most of the schools ranged between 75-80 for a low C.

[llg, PhD, RN]

My experience is that students spend way too much worring about the grading scale itself when they should be paying to the criteria for achieving a good grade.

Whatever the "cut off" are for a particular school or course does not matter much because the faculty will automatically adjust the difficulty of the assignment and grading criteria to produce the type of grade distribution that it wants. In other words, if their goal is to have only a certain percentage of the class get a B or higher, they will modify the test questions or whatever to assure that is the end result.

So ... be smart ... focus on the criteria to get a good grade and don't waste a lot of energy focusing on the numbers and wrongly assuming that an 80% is more difficult to achieve in one class (or school) than a 70% is another.