How can people think that it's reasonable that you should get a certain grade just because you really tried? Isn't your performance what matters. To me it sounds absurd that someone could perform worse but get a better grade than me just because they spent twenty hours on something that took me 1 hour to do better. If I go to a doctor I'm not interested in how hard he tries to make it perfect, I'm interested in how well he does it.
There are problems with how the grades work. You can have an A in four criterias and E in one resulting in a D in the end. That's really idiotic in my opinion so I do understand complaints against that. For example I had no chance of getting the highest grade in english after the very first test as the teacher placed my speaking exam grade a step below it. Teachers also handled and handle it very differently. Some teacher ignores that you did bad on one speaking exam if you do well the next and put your grade based on your best performance, some go for the average and some go for the worst. I think the correct thing according to the rules is going for the worst, which should be changed in my opinion.
I spoke to my mother about this before writing this post and she told me that her grades were very different. A certain amount of people in every class would get the highest grade, they only competed with each other for it. This of course wasn't fair as one class might be a lot better than another but I don't think it's much better today if you look at different schools.
What is barely enough to avoid an F at certain schools can be the top grade at others. I have experienced that people who had a higher grade than me at the subject from before were far below my level several times. I think most teachers still feel like they have to give about a certain amount of each grade to their class, which makes it bad between different schools. I might sound cocky here but I grew up in a rich suburb of Stockholm where most people had it pretty well and had good surroundings to study and learn, the school also had great teachers.
Off course the average student on my school does better than the average student in a poor suburb with poor schools that can't employ great teachers as well as possibly a lot of turbulence in their lives. Yet grades don't seem to show that much. The same goes for gymnasiums, the ones that don't require high grades to enter are much more generous with the grades they give than the schools that requires you to have top grades. To make this seem less self promoting I'll state that my grades in the elementary school and gymnasium were decent, I'm not saying that I was a genious who got everything perfect at a tough school. However I might have gotten most things perfect at a gymnasium if I had picked a one with lower requirements than mine, which I barely got into.
So what would I like to change? Except for that your grade is your average performance instead of the lowest?
Well, there are national tests in many subjects every year, tests that are the same for every school. Sometimes these tests ask the student to reason about something, then the teachers judgement comes in and changes the result but many questions have answers that are either right or wrong. Those are actually the only fair tests I see in school. Sadly schools can decide how much these tests matter, some care more others less.
I think Sweden would need more of these tests and a rule that says that they count the most. I would also like to see a system like my mothers. Not for one class, that's not fair, but for Sweden. A certain % gets the highest grade, a certain % gets the second highest and so on, the only set requirement should be the score you need to avoid an F. If everyone competes against each other students at generous schools will have to do just as well. And there is no risk that the test happens to be unusually easy one time as that means everyone performs better and the requirement for each grade is higher.
There is actually a test that works exactly that way called Högskoleprovet. If you want to go to an university you can either search with your grades or with your result on this test, you still need to have completed the gymnasium tho. This test was perfect for me as it contained maths, english and swedish, with the focus on understanding written text and maths that was more focused on logics and creative thinking than knowing certain mathematic equations, so I performed very well. It is also how I got into the education I wanted at the university I wanted without trouble.
We need more of these tests in more subjects, where all students in Sweden compete against each other, not just maths, english and swedish.
I guess this makes me seem quite biased so I will give you a story of when I was on the other end of the scale below and really tried but didn't do well.
I never had to worry about grades more than not failing my courses as I did a large test called Högskoleprovet that is another way of entering the university and performed well. I have also always had it easy to do well without studying much so you might think that I'm biased. Well ... I've been on the other end too.
May and June last year I had to make a study together with two classmates. What to write about was up to us but it had to be a scientific study of about twenty to thirty pages so it was a large work. Our group never got around to doing much. I think we spent around twenty hours on that during these five weeks. Obviously the study was too bad and we had to restart from scratch and do it during our summer holiday, which was fair.
Neither of us was good at starting large work, we prefered getting instructions but I decided that I had to. I tried to get the others started several times and did a bit myself but with around two months left until the school started and no effort at all from them I wrote that I'd be doing it solo in our group chat. One week before hand in one of them got a bit angry that I did it solo and didn't have any work left for him but we cleared it out. The other guy took a break from the studies to work at a hotel instead.
I handed in my 35 pages long study that I had spent around 200 hours on if I'm gonna pull a guess. A week later I got told that I had to improve it, which made me spend another 40 hours, the same week I got to know that my grandmother had died and that another relative had had something similar to a heart attack, no saying how dangerous. I still worked on, the second version I handed in after going through the feedbac was okay and I got an E, the lowest possible grade. I think that I deserved better and I had also heard that this was one of the toughest teachers but I wouldn't dream of asking for a better grade because of that I did it solo and had to work much harder than others. I should get the grade that I deserved based on my performace, nothing else.