Grade Inflation?

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So, I just finished an extremely hellish school term.

I've been having a lot of health problems that caused me chronic pain and disrupted my sleep. This, as you might imagine, took a toll on my ability to think and do good work.

I was really struggling with one class in particular. It was an advanced history class and the work was mostly reading primary sources and writing critical papers....

Anyway, before I got sick, I was doing really well, but things started getting bad just before the mid-term and A's started turning into B's.....

I really struggled with the last major paper. By the time I got a handle on it, I was out of time. What I turned in was really a rough draft rather than a finished paper and the professor told me as much in his comments on the last page. He said I had an interesting and novel take on the sources, but that I did not fully develop or defend my thesis.... So, I got a B there too.

I did not feel too bad about the final, but I figured it was probably a low A to a B at best.

So, I checked my grades this morning fully expecting to see my first B ever, but I found an A instead.

I'm not sure how to feel about this....

I know from talking to a few classmates that I was still doing better than they were on papers and tests, but by my reckoning I did not have enough points for an A.

I dunno, maybe he curved the final grade, but it just does not feel right... it seems arbitrary and unearned.

Grades are only one indication of how much effort you put into something. Grades are also not only an indication of how students do but how a teacher is teaching or has put together their curriculum and grading system. Your teacher may have boosted everyone's grades because of an uneven distribution.

IMHO, school is a wretched, unfair game, and if you get lucky and score an A that you think you might not have deserved, take it with glee and keep running forward, because right around the corner is going to be something about to take away an A you know you deserved.

Try your hardest to learn things.

Depending on the class, you're mostly being compared against your classmates, so there might be a curve in there.

And then there is the class you know you absolutely bombed and for some reason your grade report shows a nice B. I have no f*****g clue how that happened, and I'm not marching down to the college of engineering offices because I thought I deserved worse. Guy must not believe in Cs, Ds, or Fs.

I missed an A in antennas by one percentage point this semester. Of course, that teacher didn't file grades correctly so I got an NR on my grade report. Payback for barely getting an A in Introduction to Theatre. You win some, you loose some, a single B isn't going to ruin your goals or your future.

edit: and just learn things, participate in extracurricular activities, take an internship. Go beyond your classwork or no one is going to care if you got straight As, at least in Engineering.

Some classes are curved, especially at "higher level" universities. I wouldn't feel like its unearned, a lot of time they set the course up with the expectations for low B/C averages on exams (making harder exams gives them a larger range of scores especially when everyone is around the same level); when they curve the grade its to "even the playing field" in comparison to similar courses at other schools that might not curve their grades but have A/B averages, usually. It depends.

Grades aren't everything either, so I wouldn't let it bother you, especially if you feel like you learned a lot.

If you were within half a percentage point of the next grade, a lot of professors will round up. I think they do this so that students won't feel like they missed the next grade by less than 0.5%.

The grading scale may not be the same in every class! Some of them either curve or have scales where an A is less than 90%.

Some professor also grade hard so almost no one gets above a 90 percent.

If you had really good ideas in there, your professor may have let some technical issues slide. A lot of college students don't bother to actually THINK and instead concentrate on trying to get the "right" answer on everything. So if something is really refreshing to them, it may go a long way. I don't think you should be so hard on yourself. Just try to focus for next semester. Get rid of whatever is distracting you.