College classes vary widely too in the US. I took classes where 100% was basically the expected grade, and I took classes where I got a 40%, which was among the highest grades in the course.

I think this variance is fine, depending on the course. It is reasonable for a foreign language course to expect a 100% on an exam, if they are testing and teaching to some particular guideline, for instance. It is also reasonable to push the limits in something like a physics course, to test both "can you regurgitate", "did you understand", and "no, really, did you really really understand"?

Except, is it? People aren't going to college to get educated - you can learn almost everything you would in school on your own, since most classes end up just using a text book anyway. Only the high level stuff where you are actually interacting with phds in some field do you get value for your absurd tuition.

Most people are there for credentials, and one of those key credentials is the GPA. If taking a certain course set at one school gets you a degree considered equivalent at another, but the other school has a department head who likes "50% is average" then you end up with one student with a 3.5 and one with a 4.0 when both are equally qualified.

The one who went to the stringent school doesn't get the job. And there is very little information on what classes what what schools (and in particular, what professors) are going to give you A's for effort or D's for genius.

A small over-generalization, don't you think ? Most people go to college to BOTH learn and get a credential. You can learn almost everything on your own, but it is usually easier to do it in an organized setting (curriculum, peers, teachers help)

Grading on a curve can influence things radically. At least in the case of larger classes, an experienced professor has enough different exams and papers to grade so he can get a good statistical distribution, determine who earned what grade, and assign based on some predetermined center and max/min.

So, for example, a 98-100% might mean "top student in the class that year", a 55% might mean "lowest scoring student who deserved to pass the class", and 75% might mean "right on the average that year". (YMMV, these numbers are illustrative and different colleges and programs will have their own conventions).

The "actual" or unadjusted scores might be quite different with no curve - for example, in the freshman calculus class I took, correctly answering 4 problems out of 10 on the exam was enough to earn a grade among the top few students of the year and a curved grade in the 90s, even if the "raw" score might be something like 35-37%.

For what it's worth, the curve at Cambridge, for Natural Sciences, was set such that 67% or thereabouts is a First.

I think it may be a percent or so higher now, depending on subject. That said, I find it interesting that even though Cambridge still has damn hard exams, they still haven't escaped some grade inflation: I remember seeing a graph showing how the percentage of Firsts, 2:1s etc. has increased steadily over the last few decades. What's unclear to me is whether that's because they're awarding them more liberally now, or if students are just under a lot more pressure to succeed on paper than they used to be.

Definitely have, and it's deliberate; instead of Cambridge acting only with reference to itself (and generally grade harsher than other universities), they now apparently aim to make a Cambridge 1st or 2:1 equivalent to the same grades at the other Russell Group universities.

So there we go.

70% in Engineering. People did get more than 80% though so it's clearly not absurd. I got 100% in a couple of exams.

What I don't like about the UK system is that even though in theory marks can range from 0 to 100 percent, it seems that for practically all students, the marks are garunteed to fall in the 55 to 75 percent range. I don't mean averages, I mean for each price of work.

To me, this completely negates the point of having 100 marks to choose from.

It is completely arbitrary in the US too. Most parents will berate their children for getting a B- or C in grade school, even if that translates into 77 - 82% of some complicated problems done correctly. There were some courses I had in college where showing up and doing the homework guaranteed a 90% and the last 10% was just test grades. They might have been low 100 level courses, but someone gaming the college system can get a 4.0 GPA taking all low level courses except the bare minimums to get their choice degree, have less knowledge than someone with a 3.5, but get hired easier because the GPA is high.

Often the grades will follow a gaussian (normal) distribution. In that case, the wider, less used range, is important in capturing and quantifying the outliers. It would be an effective grading system if it saturated at the high or low end because it would no longer have the power to differentiate at the saturated end.

>2) The realization that "getting everything right" is not really how any part of the real world works.

If I'm out to be a doctor or an astronaut or an engineer, I'm likely going to question my ability to accomplish these if I'm made to feel that I've missed a bunch of knowledge on the tests. Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?). Perhaps it's an American thing, but the fear of failure made me double check and re-study things for the better. I might've been more lazy if I had grown up with the rationale that "oh well, you can't get everything right", but perhaps there's more culture that plays into that.

When I get 90% or above on a test, I like the validation that I'm successfully learning near to the pace and complexity challenges set out by the instructor. I really don't like the idea of someone aiming to keep those results lower for exclusivity or other reasons.

I'd also be curious where the increased challenge comes from.

- Are the questions longer and require more steps?

- Do they require a leap in logic to 'discover' something while you're contemplating the question?

- Is it a huge amount of recollection?

- Any combination of the above?

I think in any line of work if you go around thinking that you know everything about a subject because you got 100% in some academic test then you would be an accident waiting to happen.

Having an understanding that you don't know everything is a pretty important thing to learn.

> If I'm out to be a doctor or an astronaut or an engineer, I'm likely going to question my ability to accomplish these if I'm made to feel that I've missed a bunch of knowledge on the tests.

And that's the best thing you can do, and learn to do!

> Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences

You don't get everything right by believing that you "ought to" and rigging the game so that it looks like you do. You get everything right by always assuming the worst, double-checking everything and analyzing mistakes with the goal of making them impossible in the future, rather than finding someone to blame.

> (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?)

Because it cannot be taught too early.

For me at least it was more a time constraint than anything (well, you had to really know the material - there would be areas I knew I didn't know well enough going into the exam). I think the difficulty is set such that only the very best would ever run out of things to do in the exam, most people finish having solved the questions that they were best suited to properly, and not really attempted some of them.

> The idea of getting 80%+ in college would be absurd in the UK.

Indeed; that's the bias I was referring to in my comment above (I'm from the UK and I think, in this particular aspect at least, our system works better).