I was recently presented with the question, "Why do you review everything with letter grades... (ie. A, B, C, D, F and their respective +'s and -'s)" So I thought I'd write a quick post on why I have chosen this grading system instead of the others that exist.
Some people like to use stars, but the problem with stars is the difference between really bad and really good is generally only 3... sometimes 4... So that doesn't give you very much flexibility, because of this you are forced to start adding 1/2 stars, 3/4 stars, 5/8 stars, and 55/64 stars... It just gets too complex, and this ever so simply way of grading becomes ever so complex.
Others choose to use a scale, usually ranging from 1-10, this sounds like a great way to grade something, but once again people have to start throwing in 8.5 or 3.7, or the 9.9999999 and so on. Once again this seemingly straight forward grading system rapidly becomes a mess of 30,000 different numbers to choose from.
Finally, lets look at the perfectness of the A-F with +'s and -'s. It's the perfect grading system. First off, we all know it by heart, because we were all held accountable to it for at least 12 years (unless you never went to school, but I don't accommodate for those people because they probably can't read this anyway). As for myself, I am coming up on my 18th year of being judged by this system. In addition to having this scale engraved upon our brains, it is also straight forward. You don't get B--'s or C+++'s or anything like that, your only options are A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D-, and the dreaded F. Can it get more simple than that, I think not.
So there you go, now you all know why I like the A-F scale :)
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