But isn't school grading the exact opposite? Of course anything less than A means you did something wrong. But the test expects you to do something wrong! Failing to complete some of the tasks correctly is normal, expected and exactly what almost all students end up doing, at least semi-regularly. We are imperfect humans after all, not robots.

It's the same with services like Uber driving. There's always room for improvement, I expect the driver to make some "mistakes". Not the kind of life-threatening mistakes, of course, but more like "he could have been 30 seconds faster if he hadn't driven so sluggish" or "she may have treated my luggage with a little more care". And stuff like that is perfectly acceptable, at least as long as it doesn't all happen in the same ride. But a perfect, 5/5 ride must not contain any aspect at all that could have been improved by the driver in order to justify it's rating, and I haven't seen many of those.

Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

I feel like this standard is very different from my experience with professors that actually expected you to get things wrong and compensated by making tests where there were, say, 130 marks available and you needed to take 93 for an A.

It feels weird to me that a 5/5 is for you means "couldn't be improved" because for me it just means "I got from point A to point B with my body and possessions undamaged."

> Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

This is a really strange concept to me. So wherever you went to school, most students were always able to get 93% or more points in tests, so they "met expectations"? And there was almost nobody who managed to exceed expectations, so it wasn't necessary to keep some of the grades reserved for these people?

I can give some insight in the situation in Germany, where I live. We don't have grades A-F, but 1-6, with A=1, B=2 and so on. So it's basically the same system, just with numbers. But: there are textual expressions as well for each of the numbers. The one for the grade 4, or 'D', is "ausreichend", which means "sufficient" in German, and in the long explanation it is described as being the grade someone gets if he just managed to meet the expectations. So if you got anything above that grade, it means you were above the expectations, and if you were below, you failed to meet expectations. Typically, tests were designed such that 50% correct answers give the grade 4 and are thus expected from each student. The other 50% should be hard enough to get right so that getting a significant share of them right proves that you managed to exceed the expectations.

I guess this design should encourage students to improve themselves and to push themselves beyond the minimum expectations of teachers. By setting aside the largest part of the rating scale (1-4) to honor greatness and using just the smaller part (4-6) to punish laziness, people should rather be motivated by positive feedback instead of by punishment, which is clearly negative feedback.

> Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

Of all of the very surprising things I've learned in this thread, this is perhaps the most surprising to me.

In my view, getting less than an "A" doesn't mean you failed to meet expectations. Getting less than a "C" means that. Getting an "A" means that you performed at an exceptional level.

But there's clearly a generational shift involved in this that I hadn't noticed before now, and I think it's clearly for the worse. If "A" means "Pass" and everything else means "Fail", then there's no reason to have grades at all. Everything should just be pass/fail.

everyone has different experiences in school of course, but at the two undergrad institutions I attended it was pretty much always the case that aptitude for the subject combined with a reasonable effort (ie, turning in completed homework and some studying for exams) would result in an A for the class. only the kids who totally slacked off or were in the wrong major would get Cs or worse.

I always give myself perfect scores on any self-review.

If my manager wants to give me a lower score, that's not something I'm offended by; though I fully expect them to explain - in detail - all my shortcomings that resulted in their determination. I'll push back on just about all of their examples, even if I actually agree with their assessment.

I want my performance reviews to be as objective as possible. In my opinion, others should feel as though they have to convince me that I'm an imperfect employee, because they do.

Realistically, what does one have to gain by not defending themselves?

> I always give myself perfect scores on any self-review.

If I were the one performing employee evaluations, this would be a big red flag to me (unless you really were exceptional in all areas). It would indicate to me that you lack an awareness of your actual performance, and lacking that is significant. If someone can't reasonably evaluate how they're doing, then they can't reasonably be expected to be able to improve themselves in the areas where improvement is desired.

> fresh out of undergrad, I gave myself mostly 5/5s and a couple 4/5s where I thought I needed improvement.

Wow, I never would have expected that. I would only give myself (or expect) a 5/5 if I was really awesome in that category. On a 1-5 scale, the majority of my self-ratings would probably be 3s, with 2s for areas where I know I'm weak, and 4s for areas where I know I'm strong.

Ratings of 1 and 5 are, to me, reserved for the very end of each extreme. 1 means "nothing could be worse", and 5 means "nothing could be better".

it was certainly an embarrassing moment at the time, but I had gotten perfect scores on all my coding assignments in school, so I expected similar on my first performance review. also, when we did evaluations of our professors at the end of each semester, they would always explain that anything less than a 5/5 was basically fucking them over and we better have a good reason for the rating.

it's hard to understand what a rating out of five actually means unless someone takes the time to explain it in plain english.

> they would always explain that anything less than a 5/5 was basically fucking them over and we better have a good reason for the rating.

In my view, that is an unconscionable level of unprofessionalism. I'd rate any professor who told me that lower just because they told me that -- and say why.

definitely unprofessional, but every last one of them explained it that way. made me think that they were just victims of an unreasonable system. maybe I was naive.