Grading in education facts for kids
School grades help measure how well you understand what you learn. They show your progress in a class. Grades can be letters, like A to F. They can also be numbers, like percentages or scores out of 100.
Sometimes, all your grades are put together. This creates a grade point average (GPA). Your GPA shows your overall school performance. It's often used in high school and college. Colleges or future employers might look at your GPA. A cumulative GPA (CGPA) includes all your grades from every course you've taken.
Where Did School Grades Come From?
The idea of grading students has a long history. Some people say the first grades in the United States were given at Yale University in 1785. The president, Ezra Stiles, used words like "Optimi" (best) and "Pejores" (worst) for students. By 1837, Yale changed these words into numbers. This might be how the modern GPA scale started.
Another idea is that a tutor named William Farish at the University of Cambridge in England first used numbers for grades in 1792. However, some historians question this. The way we grade also shows how teachers and students think about learning.
The letter grading system (A-D/F) first appeared at Mount Holyoke College in 1897. But it took a long time for this system to become common. By 1971, about two-thirds of schools in the United States used it.
Different Grading Systems Around the World
Most countries have their own ways of grading students. Even within one country, different schools might use different systems. For example, some schools use letters, while others use numbers. There are also international standards, like the European Baccalaureate, which helps compare grades across different countries.
See also
- Grading on a curve
- Sudbury school, a school model for ages 4 through 18 with schools internationally with no grading or grade levels
- Competency-based learning, an alternative to the traditional letter grade system
- Mastery Transcript Consortium, a group working to create alternatives to the traditional grading system in secondary schools
- Report card
- Test score
