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GRADING AND EXAMS

From the time American children start school to the time they
graduate from high school, they almost never have to take any one
formal examination that determines whether they move on to the
next grade or level. Rather, academic performance is evaluated on
many different aspects of a student's performance. A grade in a
subject will depend on test scores, homework assignments, and
class participation.
This means that students have more than just one chance to
prove themselves, and if they are not at their best when taking
exams, they won't necessarily fail. Because this system is the only
one that Americans know, they don't use the term "continual
assessment" to describe it, and they think the examination system
in most other countries is incredibly unfair.
The word grade is used where British English would use
"mark," which is rarely used in American English. Students are
given a particular grade on a test or assignment, or in a class; a
teacher grades papers. Very often, a score (usually a percentage
out of 100) is given on a test or assignment, which is then
converted to an equivalent letter grade.
Grading begins in earnest at the middle school level, and is
usually done with letters from A to F, with A being "excellent"; B
"good"; C "average"; D "poor"; and F "failed." The letter E is not
used in the grading scale. The grades may be further qualified by
the use of the symbols "+" and "-" after the letters, so that A+ is
the very best grade one can get, and a D- could be a very poor, but
passing, grade. A scale of 1 to 100 is also used sometimes, but the
number would be converted to a letter to assign the student a
grade. An A grade corresponds roughly to a score of 100 to 90; B
is 89 to 80; C is 79 to 70; D is 69 to 60; and F is anything below
that.
At the end of every quarter, students receive an overall grade
that is an average of all the individual grades they got on assign-
ments and tests during the quarter. At the end of each semester, the
two quarter grades are averaged to produce the grade that becomes
part of a student's grade point average, or GPA.
The GPA is an average taken of all of a student's semester
grades that assigns a numerical value to each letter grade on a
scale from 0 to 4.0: An A grade is 4.0, a B is 3.0, a C is 2.0, and a