Did you understand the concept of grades as a child?

Post Reply New Topic

Did you understand the concept of grades when you were a kid. I was in public school until the 5th grade and didn't really understand the concept of these grade things until 7th or 8th grade. I knew my letters and numbers up to 20 before kindergarten and there were just as many good things that started with the letter F that did the letter A. Why was F so bad and why was A so good. The other kids would just give me vague answers.


I remember in kindergarten doing a collage to explain the concept of shapes. I was really proud of it and the teacher was really impressed. She drew a star on it (when I was in kindergarten in the early 90's, we didn't have grades or homework) and I felt it defaced my collage and was no longer so proud of it. I got good grades in later grades but only knew they were good because other people said they were, I just never understood why.

In third grade when I first started having homework, my mom came up with a point system and so much homework would get me so many points. I could "buy" Dollar Store toys and stuffed animals with so many "points" but it didn't work because it would have taken weeks to get enough points to "afford" one thing. At first, I thought maybe I could grade these grade things in for points in exchange for some kind of reward at school. Nope. I couldn't. I got a letter written down on my paper and that was it. The concept of grades didn't click for me until high school.

Yes, but we only use numbers here for grading, never letters, so that's simpler I bet. The higher the number you get, the better your results. It was very easy to understand.

I did. But I didn't understand the concept of exams, until my 3rd grade.

I understood about grades, although I didn't care about them much. However, when I went to High School, our classes were grouped according to the grades we had gotten the previous year. Class 9A were the smart ones, while 9G were likely enough to repeat the grade. I didn't realize that my class number had this significance until many years later.
I went from 9C to 10E, because I found out that the actual right answer was sometimes worth nothing, and quit caring at all.
Since BS was needed to get a BS degree, I lost respect for even the PhD - Piled Higher and Deeper. I went to the library for my engineering, and then was invited to lecture to graduating engineers.

I grew up in China. Our grades were: Excellent, good, average, mediocre. I think that's pretty easily understood. I remember getting my first piece of homework back in grade one and got a "good". I was so pleased until told there's a better grade. I always got excellent after that, unless I really screwed up.

Yes. For about before elementary/primary school yeasrs. I just didn't care.
From where I live, anything below '75' is a mark of fail. '75' does not necessarily mean '75%' or '75 pts', but it is equivalent to an F to F+ yet it means barely passing. '90'+s is like, A and above or so, it simply means outstanding.

Last I checked the system, it's almost still the same. At least so far in most schools I can check on.
Yet on much later levels, some do grade with numbers 1 to 5. With 1 means excellent, 2 would be good, 3 barely passing/mediocre, 4-5 needs improvement or fail. Sometimes its the other way around, which is less common it seems. Or, it's 1 to 3 instead.
Some based around '65' instead of '75'. Even fewer are straight up pass or fail.

I even avoid going for honors by not taking anything academics seriously. Never ever read notes at home, never voluntarily studied.
I'd prefer to learn things on the spot -- so yes, that includes being in a rowdy classroom.

Most of my classmates, as I remember, are usually nervous. I never did because I didn't care. Not even during college.


If anything, I understood the most concepts of reading and language much later. Which is, well, not any later than age 14, at 3rd year high school of K to 10.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

Never had trouble with that. You have a sequence of either letters or numbers. The first equals the best, and you go down from there.

My parents were more confused than I was. Once mom screamed "YOU GOT AN 'E" on the EXAM, ...WHAT IS AN 'E'???????????????".

And I had to go through the humiliation of explaining to her that an E is the lowest grade (after A,B,C, and D). To which she responded "you mean you FLUNKED...in my day they called that AN F! not an 'E'". I mumbled "yeah. I guess some schools do it ABCDE, and some do it ABCDF" while hanging my head in shame.

Then there was that one time in grade school that the school used a REALLY strange grading system. They used letters to stand for adjective words, rather than letters in sequence in the alphabet. Like "O" for outstanding, and "I" improving, and "A" for average. Both my parents AND I were thoroughly confused by THAT report card!

It was BS because these letter meant the same things as traditional grade letters. Outstanding really meant the same thing as "A", and "improving" was really "getting a B", and "A for average" was really "getting a C", and so on. But it took decoding to figure it out. If you had been getting O for outstanding in a subject, but then you got an "I for improving" in it, it really meant that you had slacked off and had dropped from A's to a B. But it SOUNDED like you had been "outstanding", but then you had somehow "IMPROVED" to being even …. BETTER... than outstanding!

I understood enough about grades as a child to know that if I did not get good ones I was a Bad, Bad Boy.

I understood the concept of grades TOO well from a VERY young age.

We had the Outsanding-Satisfactory-Needs Improvement sorts of grades in elementary school.

Number grades, out of 100, in junior high.

The ABCDF sorts of grades in high school and college.

Yes, and I always wanted to get the best possible grade.

I didn't understand them either. I knew 100% meant you got everything correct. I knew F meant fail so I never failed anything because I never got an F. But the grades just didn't affect me because I had no concept of it. I didn't understand them till maybe 6th grade. C meant average so I was always proud because I did it all myself but my mom would be disapointed. That was my normal grade anyway.

There are a lot of things which are arbitrarily agreed upon, because we need some mutually understandable set of language and symbolism to communicate. Their 'truth' comes from their status in our collective conscious as already agreed upon, not for reasons inherent to the things in of themselves.

This was not a problem with grades (though I can see why it would be. Why do we associate A with good and F with bad?), but there have been many such cases which were confusing to me growing up. If someone could have just taken the 10 seconds to formulate the above sentence to me, I probably would have had a much easier time in many cases.

Another problem I see a lot of neurotypical people have is the inability to tell that something really is arbitrary. I think they come by things subconsciously, and associate emotions with the things they subconsciously learn, so there is a sort of emotional investment in the status quo (even if it truly is arbitrary). I have frustrated some NT people by informing them that foods we associate with breakfast, lunch, and dinner are only attributed as such arbitrarily. They can't explain why, but to them it feels wrong to eat, say, pancakes for dinner and assume that it must be for some good reason. This is the cause of a lot of funny inter-cultural disconnects. Some cultures associate something as good or bad, and another culture associates that same thing as the opposite.

Yes, I don't remember having any trouble at all understanding the grading that they did, probably because they were constantly telling us about it. At my first school they'd pass judgement on every piece of work we did, the teacher would draw a star on it if it was good, and you'd get a "sticky star" (i.e. a sticker of a star) if it was exceptionally good. If it was acceptable you got a tick, and if it was unacceptable you got a cross. They were always adding up our marks and ranking us in league tables according to performance. They even had a "top boy" and "top girl" award in the final year of that school when we were 7 years old.
In my next school the desks were arranged in rows, top row, second row, third, and bottom, and every so often they'd move us around according to our latest scores, so we were being continually reminded of the importance of our performance as individuals. The teacher would look down on those in the bottom row and was often downright nasty to the kids who didn't perform well. I was lucky enough to mostly do well so I was OK with it all.

There wasn't really anything about it for me not to understand. Getting the right answers led to approval and rewards from teachers and parents, and high ranking was just an extra dimension of that process. Getting the wrong answers meant the opposite for those who for some reason didn't have my luck. I saw that equation operating every day. I never wondered why they did it all, it was just there.

As for actual exam grades, I knew that a high grade meant extra rewards, but as my performance began to drop over the years I wasn't too bothered by the actual numbers, I was only really concerned with the binary "pass" or "fail," and my only real interest was avoiding that "fail" label, which I managed to do, by the skin of my teeth.

I understood the concept of grades, I just never got any type of encouragement one way or the other like I should have gotten.

I did understand, but did not care much. This was especially true when I was marked down for correct answers because the teacher did not like how my work was shown. After having worked for several managers who had a degree, but knew nothing of the job it became clear to me that the higher education system is nothing more than an elaborate pay to play scheme.