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.
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.
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."