Based on purely personal experience.

I have two friends, Ex and Wye.

Ex was a very studious guy. He used to study everyday on the topics the classes focused on. He never missed any lecture without any extreme reason (like being sick or house catching on fire) and always listened to the words the instructors uttered very attentively.

He was the rescuer for the other students. We constantly disturbed him with our inquiries and silly questions. He helped us, always.

Of course Ex had a great CGPA.

After graduation in the year 2017, he became a lecturer. He will be flying to Canada pretty soon for pursuing higher degrees. He will do MS, then PhD. He aims at being a great researcher. He is totally on track and doing great.

My other friend Wye, was not a very attentive guy in the classroom.

He used to bring his laptop with him to the classes. During the lectures, while most of the students were trying to understand what the instructors were talking about, Wye would totally ignore all that and occupy himself with his laptop. In later semesters, he was hardly attending any classes.

No, he was not wasting time.

He was actually coding and solving algorithmic problems on various websites. In later years, he became one of the best competitive programmers in our university and his team did great in ICPC Dhaka regional site contest.

Of course he had an average CGPA. He used to study only for few days before the exams.

After graduation, Wye got a job in Singapore, now he is in Silicon Valley.

He never cared much for good results. And this never stopped him.

The point is, if grades do not matter to you, something else should. And that something else should be worth it.

If you fail to find your something else, stick to good grades. Good grades are not going to harm you anyway.

This is how it works.

The better you are at something, the more likely it is to matter in your life.

Jane has great grades in school, and applies to PhD programs. She knows she wouldn’t have gotten into grad school without good grades, so for her, grades were really important.

Jim doesn’t have top grades, but he does have a lot of friends. Senior year, he applies to software engineering jobs, and gets referrals to all the best companies. He solves several hundred questions on LeetCode, and gets a great job offer right out of college. For Jim, grades weren’t important; what mattered were friendships and interview prep.

If you have great grades, you will find that grades matter a lot. If you have great work experience, you will find that experience critical to your success. If you have great people skills, you will find that matters a lot too.

The most successful people recognize their strengths early on, and choose goals and activities that leverage their strengths.

Freshman year, Algebra class. I managed to bump my grade from a D- to an A.

Today, we have that “Common Core” system, which I despise. Just let me do my own thing. Now, I’m a person with a strong personality. I wouldn’t do the common core because I didn’t like it, and I could solve the problems with my own, quicker methods. Until the teacher got to know me, she thought (I assume) I was just one of those students. She gave me a 0 on every assignment I didn’t turn in. That MASSIVELY affected my grade, but whatever. This class was a skinny, so I had twice the amount of time to make sure I didn’t have to retake it. For those of you that don’t know, a skinny is a class where instead of having it every day for ninety minutes, lasting two terms, you have it every day for fourty-five minutes or every other day for ninety minutes, but it lasts for all four terms.

Back to the topic!

Near the end of the first term, she started to realize “Oh, this girl is actually getting everything correct.”
So she pulled me aside at the end of class one day, and made a deal with me.

“As long as you keep your test scores at an A- or higher, I won’t make you do your homework.”

That was a good deal. Good for me because I didn’t have to do my homework in that class, and good for the teacher because I’d have to pay extra attention.
It ended up being a harder deal, however, because that’s when they started using the new grading scale. Anything lower than 70% was an F. This meant I needed to get a 94% or higher on every test in order to keep the deal. I pulled through though, and within a little less than 3 weeks, my D- went to an A.

Long story short, just put in a bit of extra effort :)

Unfortunately, when it comes to grad school admissions, it does. I graduated from a top Indian college with a GPA of around 7.4/10, which basically made my PhD applications dead at all leading US universities, even though I'd good research experience and great recommendations. I'd always wanted to do a PhD, but because of this was forced to shell out millions and join a masters program instead. In my masters, I worked half as hard as in college. My GPA? 4/4. And what's more, it was very obvious that undergraduates in US get grades of, say A- working as hard as a 6 pointer in an Indian college. And yet adcoms favor students with such inflated grades over those with lower ones. They never think that maybe the latter guy has worked harder and his grades are low only because in his college, they tend to be low. To clarify, the average grade in most Indian schools is a B or C (in my college, the median got a B- with a grade point of 7 in a 10 point scale) while in the US the median gets an A-. I did get into a good PhD program finally (your grad school grades are excellent and your performance shows a significant increase from your undergrad days, they said in the offer letter!), but it was only a year later and after coughing up money in dollars. So, in short grade inflation does matter and the adcoms will never learn. If some player scores a 100 goals in the Polish league, will he be as good as Messi? I wish the adcoms understood this simple arithmetic.

In Austria grading is form 1 (very good) to 5 (failed).

My biggest bump was from a 5 on the written test to a 1 after the oral exam in Introduction to Operation Research.

It went something like this:

On the written exam we had to do a mathematical proof for a given problem and manually calculate an algorithm (Simplex if I recall correctly).

Did both, finished in half the given time and handed my paper in.
5 minutes later while thinking over my answers I notice my proof is wrong. Another 5 minutes later I notice the calculation i did was also wrong.

Well, off to the bar to drink… :-(

2 weeks later I get invited to the oral exam. My professor asked me if I knew what I did wrong. I told him, corrected my errors from memory and explained what exactly went wrong.

After that we talked a bit more (the subject was interesting to me, so i knew it quite well) and in the end he told me that since I obviously knew the subject he would overlook my bad day and give me a 1.

After that I wen to a bar to celebrate :-)

I don't see why not. Asking is not illegal or unethical or dishonest. It isn't even demanding as snowflake students seem to do all the time in college. It is simply asking.

I would suggest that you ask if the teacher will drop the 1st quarter grade and average the others. Actually in my grading system, I would give you the letter grade based on the 97. It is clear that you understand the material at the 97, not at the 83. My goal is to have you learn the material, and you clearly have done so. The idea that an average of all quarters means anything is nonsense.

Yes, I hate grades on a report card. They are almost always useless, misused, and arbitrary.

It matters if it affects your thinking to the extent that you start looking at other countries with the same prism that you apply to yourself.

Case in point:
I was an exchange student at UC Berkeley a while back in EECS.

I met a grad ad-com guy, he was shocked when I told him my expected GPA at Berkeley (3.85) and my GPA back home (~3.0).

He was under the impression that he was presiding over one of the most grade deflated colleges in the US- but it didn't even occur to him that it was substantially grade inflated compared to my school in India, which follows the scoring pattern used by MIT in the 1940s (not pretty) and the 50%th percentile grade is a C (= 6/10).

He basically told me that If he saw my Indian grades in an application pool, he'd toss them out. Even though I was from the most selective private school in my country, - and in the top quarter of my class.

Perhaps colleges should publish Mean and Variance data as well, an easy way to normalize grades.

Full Disclosure for people's reference:
I graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science at Pilani with a 7.82/10 GPA after trying every trick in the book to raise my GPA (And that's a 3.13 to many grad school Adcoms!)

The median GPA at BITS was between 6.5-7 out 10 (2.6-2.8 out of 4). Around 5-7% of the students graduate with a 9 or more (3.6+) and some graduating batches get 1 guy with a perfect 10.

According to the formulae provided by Alex K. Chen, an equivalent US school would have an average GPA of around 3.48.

I am currently a 4.0 at Columbia.

Not saying it was a walk in the park - I did work hard here- but let's just say there was a much more direct correlation between effort and outcome here.

Always use rubrics for writing assignments and projects. Quizzes and tests are objective to start with. Using rubrics makes grading subjective assignments more objective. When teachers give out the rubric with the assignment, the student knows exactly how they will be graded and what to strive for. There are web sites that explain how to create and use a rubric. Students who question the grade are easily referred to the grading rubric that is given back to the student with the assignment. It takes a little more paper, but it’s worth it. All my composition assignments used the same rubric, so I only give it to them for the first assignment. After I graded assignments, I stapled on the rubric I used to grade it.

A2A

One letter grade, so approx 10%, each of the first two of three grading periods to finish with a semester “A” starting with an earned first grading period average of “C.”

First semester I had been ill and home bound. The school system allowed me to take Spanish and Algebra from home, but it was before any of today’s technology. I had a microphone/speaker box that a student carried to each room and plugged in for me. I could hear class, but could not see anything displayed or written on the board.

When I went back to my own school for second semester, I was behind my class and had to catch up. The teacher, a wonderful man named Mr. Tucker, knew I was working and was confident that I would end well. So, he bumped my grade up the first two marking periods so that my average would be an “A.” I did the work. But, it happened because he was an old fashioned student centered teacher who cared about us.

I've encountered students who were anxiously concerned about every grade - I'm not exactly sure what's meant by grade grubbing. It implies digging in the dirt for better grades. Or groveling but grubbing potatoes means to dig them out of the ground. It's honest work.

With younger students who come grubbing to dig out a better grade they do it because it's a kind of game, they're sporting individuals. Others are competitive with themselves, they truly want each performance to be their very best and they come eager to present their case, explain their answers and honestly understand what was wrong in their performance.

The students burdened with anxiety are the least grubbing.,their anxiety over grades is too great for them to be able to have any discussion about any grades. They're imbued with fear for their future, sometimes fear of their parents but it's real fear and anxiety.

They can, or they cannot, and when you’re making them is a big issue.

Straight A’s in 3′rd grade might not mean much unless in the process the child cultivates a drive for high achievement and high expectations. So settling for mediocrity thinking you’ll crack down someday may engrain bad habits/attitudes that’ll short-change your potential. Also, when you get into coursework that builds on earlier work, a strong foundation of knowledge in the basics is needed for high performance later (wish I’d known that in my high school Geometry class; hitting it hard up front would have paid off!).

Straight A’s in middle and high school might land a college scholarship drastically reducing your (and your family’s) cost and your future student debt…if you go to college and maintain the GPA to keep it.

Good grades in college can open doors of opportunity to enter more prestigious post-grad. schools (I hear what school your law degree comes out of can be a big deal), or entry at all into highly competitive professional schools (e.g.: medical school is infamous for this). If you aim to apply to such.

So getting good grades can instill character, work ethic, high personal standards for performance and good study habits. It can at some points in the academic process open doors of opportunity - which matters when and if you take advantage of them.

This is said to occur, but I doubt it.

Grade Inflation is the norm.

Students today think that if they follow directions they should get 100

Fact is, following directions, meeting requirements is a C. A 75.

As schools have become more lax, as they have become more involved in social engineering and parenting, over time with all of the cultural marxism that has invaded the classroom, more than teaching the basics has occured. Also, students expect to be receiving good grades for merely upholding the emergining consensus.

Some schools are tough graders, others easy.

For some Ivy, the difficult part is getting in, this also goes for systems in countries where they have tough national entrance exams which determine the quality of school you goto, thereafter, grades are easy.

Some Ivy, on the other hand, and some well-known tech schools are very difficult graders, against the average.

I tend to think grade inflation rather than deflation is occuring. Examples, outside of some supposed social engineering project with the corret answers the very premises of the ideology, would be making it dififcult to get an A while giving C’s. But, indeed, this might be appropriate, average does average work, great work is done by few in a class, I am grading several hundred assignments curreently. Less than 2 or 3% really deserve an A. Likely double or triple that percentage will end up with an A, because of my method for grading, emphasizing, meeting requirements for points, where analysis and well-structured argument are demoted in the grading process.

Definition? The other answers explain what it is. How might you test whether grade inflation has occurred? Try marking a paper from a previous cohort. But be warned, you will be depressed by the results.

On a related topic, I used to put papers from 1981, simply because it was the oldest set of papers I had, in front of my students at the beginning of their last year. The likely grade D&Es would get an old O-level paper, the Bs&Cs would see an AS or AO, the As and double Maths students would see an A-level paper and the Oxbridge likelies would see the Further Maths paper, all from the same year. If I worked it right, they all thought they were seeing the same thing. A fairly common response was “I don’t recognise this maths”, sometimes “I don’t recognise this as Maths”. Then there was a sensible discussion about the changes in expectations: of syllabus, of grading, of the numbers in any grade and even the likely marks for the top and bottom grades. This exercise served to drag their heads out of the rut that makes the grade target the only objective of the year, if sometimes only briefly.

Many people think that most land plots are flat. But it's not. In nature, there are no perfectly flat areas at all. Most of them require grading or leveling, especially if you plan construction on the site. Levelling of the site must be carried out not only before the start of construction. But also after its completion, this process is important. Most gardeners who have small plots try to do it manually. But after the first few hours of work, they begin to look for special equipment for leveling. To do the task professionally you can hire expert grading contractors in Edmonton.

Visits for more:

It depends … School is a time for exploring, and sometimes, you’re going to wind up in a class for which you have little or no aptitude, and you’ll get a poor grade. As a prospective employer, I’d be encouraged by your attempt to at least explore various subjects.

Some students don’t learn well, especially in highly regimented classes. As a prospective employer, it would be relatively easy for me to spot the difference between a poor learner and a prospective employee with an alternative learning pattern. Fluency matters, and—since most of us talk a lot—you’ll get many opportunities to hone your skills, even if for some reason you can’t read a word!

Fortunately, most students have a variety of teachers, and the overall patterns of your grades can be a reasonably good yardstick of both your abilities, and your teachers’ abilities. A consistent pattern of A’s and B’s indicates a strong ability to learn in a more or less traditional school setting. A consistent patterns of C’s, D’s and F’s indicate a problem that you’ll have to work hard to overcome in an employee interview.

One hint: the purpose of a resumé is not to get the job, in most cases. It’s to get the interview. The interview is where you demonstrate your compatibility with the company you want to work for. So get help, if you must, proofreading and polishing your resumé.

In the field of construction or landscape design, grading refers to the shaping of the land to direct surface water away from the structure. The water within the property should eventually join a common public drainage system. A lot grading plan is essential to avert this issue, and the local authorities insist on the same for the construction or renovation of a structure.It is also done to make a provision for new structures, parking, and other utilities. Grading plans are required when performing slope repairs, tract grading, site preparation, base excavations, pool excavations, and more.

A grading plan outlines the criteria for land development. Design elevation, surface gradient, lot type, and swale location are the usual components of the plan. The plan also shows the elevations, dimensions, slopes, drainage patterns, etc.

The preparation of a grading plan calls for a combination of engineering and mathematical skills. A licensed civil engineer or architect is usually the person who supervises the development of a grading plan. The best practice is to put a civil engineer on the job since he/she is used to delving deeper into the technicalities of this kind of work. When the grading activities exceed a certain quantity of grading material, a civil engineer will be asked to prepare the plan in most cases. This is because an engineer knows exactly how much soil has to be removed and how much has to be filled. The grading plan is always prepared with this aspect in mind. It’s safe and prudent to pick a seasoned engineer who has in-depth knowledge of the federal and state laws.

Yes, it can matter. I'll dissect this into two components: the "internal" component - or the effects of grade inflation on the student while he's in college, and the "external" component, or the effects of grade inflation on the student when he's applying to graduate schools. I've taken all the quotes from the excellent pdf at http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf

Internally, grade inflation can produce multiple effects. Two of the more important ones are highlighted below

At these high levels of grades where almost everybody is automatically above average, it can be difficult to motivate many students to excel (e.g., Harackiewicz et al., 1997). At the upper end of GPAs, it lumps the achievements of outstanding students together with those of all other students.

There's another one as well: fewer students tend to "fail" a course under a system of grade inflation. Sometimes, the university then decides to change its grading policies (a 2.0 becomes the "failing" grade, rather than a 1.0), but these sorts of changes only occur after a substantial time lag, and until they happen, many students pass courses that they otherwise wouldn't pass [1]. This could mean, for example, that many of them take future courses that they're not quite ready for. It could also decrease the quality of a department's majors as well (this is definitely a point of discussion in the University of Washington physics department right now, as there are basically two entirely different groups of students who are physics majors - http://www.phys.washington.edu/users/ellis/Physics%20Undergraduate%20Degrees.pdf has some more information on that)

As Humanities departments also tend to have higher GPAs than science departments, there's a substantial disincentive for students to enroll in STEM fields (which is a common subject of complaint among many).

The overall low grades in science departments at most schools and relatively low grades in science and engineering schools translate into disincentives for students to enroll in science and engineering at an undergraduate level or pursue graduate study (Sabot and Wakeman-Linn, 1991; Johnson, 2003)

And certain groups may be more sensitive to these disincentives than other groups - which could partially explain certain gender/racial disparities in STEM fields

[1] There's also a "cultural" perception of what 2.0/3.0/4.0 mean, and that "cultural" perception also has a substantial time lag before it really changes (for example, a lot of people are given the message that a "B" is fundamentally okay/average - but this isn't true anymore when GPAs are being inflated above a baseline level of 3.0. This time lag may make them work less hard, as long as they're still convinced that a 3.0 is "okay", for example)

======

Now, what about external effects (like graduate school admissions)?

Looking at finer scale variability, we find that colleges and universities have, without any collective consultation or external pressure, collectively created an ad hoc national grading scale based on school selectivity. Our database indicates that current grades at an institution can be roughly predicted by either of the following two formulae:

Average GPA = 2.8 +0.005SEL + (if school is private add 0.2)
Average GPA = 2.8 + 0.001(SATMV-850) + (if school is private add 0.1)

where SATMV is the combined average Math and Verbal SAT score of students and SEL is a selectivity measure that represents the average of the percentage of students with high school GPAs above 3.75, the percentage of students who graduated in the upper 10% of their high school class, and the percentage of student applicants rejected.

The above two equations suggest that private schools are grading 0.1 to 0.2 higher on a 4.0 scale for a given talent level of student. Since the evidence indicates that private schools in general educate students no better than public schools (Perscarella and Ternzini, 1991), private schools are apparently conferring small but measurable advantages to their students by more generous grading

Public flagship schools are significantly positively skewed in their grading relative to other public schools. What is perhaps most striking is that science and engineering schools – the MITs and Georgia Techs of academe – grade on average about 0.15 lower than their non-science and engineering peers. This may be why these schools tend to have lower retention levels; it also means that their graduates are disadvantaged in terms of their post-graduate prospects.

And here's the thing: graduate admission committees simply don't have the time to learn all the minute details about a school's grading distribution. Consequently, they're usually not particularly inclined to give a student the benefit of the doubt if the student came from a school with a low average GPA. And this problem actually seems particularly pronounced among Caltech undergraduates who apply to graduate school, as I've explained at Alex K. Chen's answer to What are the downsides of attending Caltech as an undergrad? .

Almost all of Caltech's undergrads are among the top in the nation, but since the average GPA (was) only around 3.2 [update: it's higher now], there are a substantial number of talented Techers who don't even have the GPAs required to meet the minimum GPA cutoffs of 3.00 [2] that are often required among graduate school applicants. And since Caltech is so small, most graduate schools don't have enough Caltech students to be prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to them.

Most schools want to be "desirable" to students. If a school ends up practicing (too much) grade deflation, it could hurt the post-career aspects of students, which could make the school less desirable to future students in the end.

[2] Cutoffs that are almost certainly enforced more when more schools use grade-inflated distributions.

==

There are also numerous smaller effects as well (which may apply to smaller populations of students).

For example, they may penalize students who take risks (risks such as taking graduate level courses at a very young age - where they could potentially have a substantial chance of getting a 0.0 GPA, but still potentially learn a huge amount - ComplexZeta from Art of Problem Solving once said that it was precisely what he was doing in freshman year - learning huge amounts of math by failing graduate level math courses). The problem with that, is that a 0.0 GPA in a particular course imposes a particularly harsh penalty on a student when everyone else's GPA is grade-inflated.

Students who take numerous risks, for example, are also penalized since they may have higher "GPA variances" than others - so they may get an unusually high number of 4.0s and an unusually high number of 0.0s. But then the problem is that their 4.0s don't really tell them apart from anyone else. So they end up with lower average GPAs, and often get their applications thrown out before they get looked at.

And in fact, some of these applicants are exceptional ones, as you can see over at the excellent answer from George Anders over at What are some signs that you would see in a potentially good employee, but that you would definitely not see in a truly exceptional one?

Extraordinary people often meander through college with a mix of A-pluses and Cs. If a subject fascinates them, they do unbelievably well. If it doesn't, their grades can be defiantly bad.

Grading is an attempt to determine how well you have learned the material taught you in a class. The usual way is by giving the students assignments and/or tests.

Absolute grading is when the percent right answers on a test is the grade. For the term, the grades are averaged to get the final grade. The problem is that this is totally arbitrary. It takes real skill to write tests that give a good evaluation. For any course, I could write a test so easy that almost anyone gets a good grade. On the other hand, I could write a test so difficult that few will pass.

Relative grading (also called grading on the curve) is to apply the grades to the bell shaped curve of statistics. This tells us where any student ranks with regard to those in that population. The population used is usually that class. While this may tell you who is learning a lot and who is sleeping in class, it does not really tell the teacher who is learning the material. In an honors class, a 95% may be a C grade. In a special education class, a 55% on the same test may be the highest in the class and get an A+.

Grading is a necessary evil. There is no good way to grade, but we must somehow determine who has learned enough of the material to get credit and be passed to the next higher class. Some institutions also think they have to rank students and determine who is best. Again, grades are usually used.

Personally I think grades are given too much importance. Both grading systems have their faults. I reluctantly give my vote to absolute grades.

In my opinion, I think what really counts is whether or not you know enough of the material to use it later in life, such as on a job.

Suppose an exam is conducted with same questionnaire. However correct and scrutinized, the candidate can have doubt about its impartiality. So, relative scoring is done. A top intelligent ( or studied ) candidate gets more marks or points. Then consider this as 100 and find relative scores can be given to other candidates to minimize the error possibility or unintentional partiality if any.
A topper gets 90 then 10% of 90 is 9. So (90-9)% = (100 -10 )%
Thus, the score 81 will be converted to 90% ( Actually 90% of 90 )
Thus the formula is:-
Your actual score = (shown score)X(topper's score)/100

Depends on your life plan. If you keep in mind that there is a world outside. And you can keep your social habilites honed. You will do fine with good grades. If you become a pompous know it all you will do fine too just your alternatives, will be different if you have success initially do not forget those that do the heavy lifting. And occasionally do it yourself.. You will do fine.. Never forget that life has different stages be prepared for old age where your grades in school are irrelevant.. Learn from. Life and get good grades a life of service to the needy is more rewarding than a self entered grades life.

Intersheath Grading

In this method of cable grading ,a homogenous dielectric is used but it is divided into various layers by placing metallic intersheaths between the core and lead sheath. The intersheaths are held at suitable potentials which are in between the core potential and earth potential. This arrangement improves the voltage distribution in the dielectric of the cable and consequently more uniform potential gradient is obtained.

[caption id="attachment_2452" align="alignnone" width="660"]

Fig: Intersheath grading of cables[/caption]

consider a cable of core diameter d and outer lead sheath of diameter D. Suppose the two intersheaths of diameters d1 and d2 are inserted into the homogenous dielectric and maintained at some fixed potentials.Let V1 ,V2 and V3 respectively be the voltages between core and intersheath 1 ,between intersheaths 1 and 2 and between intersheath 2 and outer lead sheath. As there is a definite potential differences between the inner and outer layers of each intersheath ,therefore, each sheath can be treated like a homogenous single core cable.

Maximum stress between core and intersheath 1 is

similarly,

since the dielectric is homogenous, the maximum stress in each layer is the same i.e.

As the cable behaves like three capacitors in series, therefore, all the potential are in phase i.e. voltage between conductor and earthed lead sheath is

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