After awaking from my afternoon nap today (yeah, still a little jetlagged, in spite of it all. And come on, it's cold and wet out there, and it's 4 PM, so the sun's going down), I received an e-mail to the effect that our Postmodern Lit final essays - the ones that determine 99.9% of our course grade - were ready for pickup. No preamble, no warning.
Well, it's been a month. About time.
I popped in to see Anne Mason, the registrar, for the second time today, and she laughed when I told her I'd come to take one off her hands. She said I had no cause for worry. I told her that the professor had warned us that she'd be tough, and had given the Americans a repeat of the "chill out, the grading scale is different" speech, then made my exit and tore into the envelope.
Funny thing about British universities - no grades are permanent until the end of the year, when readers from other British universites go over our stuff and modify the grades as necessary. I suppose this is a good way to keep professors from taking out grudges on students, but it seems a waste of time to me. Anyway...
She'd given me a 68. Considering that 70 is the beginning of honors, I wasn't too upset, but I wanted a more formal conversion.
One of the lovely study abroad websites, however, explained that there really is no formal conversion between UK and US grades, but they offered four charts of rough UK-letter grade approximations. 68 is probably an A, maybe an A-.
Hmm. Thanks for telling me, guys. I can live with that. It's Postmodernism, for crying out loud!
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