Bring on the Night

When my parents were young, Denmark had a completely screwed grade system in the schools. There were grades like “UG”, “UG+”, “UG-” and similar crazy stuff.

When I started school it had changed to a numeric system (which in theory sounds better and more logic). Unfortunately the professors who invented this one weren’t mathematics professors, so their counting was flawed and we ended up with this result:

00 Given for the completely unacceptable performance.
03 Given for the very hesitant, very insufficient and unsatisfactory performance.
5 Given for the hesitant and not satisfactory performance.
6 Given for the just acceptable performance.
7 Given for the mediocre performance, slightly below average.
8 Given for the average performance.
9 Given for the good performance, a little above average.
10 Given for the excellent but not particularly independent performance.
11 Given for the independent and excellent performance.
13 Given for the exceptionally independent and excellent performance.

One thing is the “holed” counting, but what happened when they decided that ‘00′ pronounced zero-zero (I think one of the professors must have had a secret love for Japanese aircrafts of WWII) and ‘03′ pronounced zero-three was a good idea? Why not just say ‘0′ and ‘3′?

Anyway we lived with this idiotic system until recently when someone decided that we could do better. So EU school overheads sat down and tried to make a common system all EU countries could use. Wise enough I guess.

Well, it weren’t. Instead of doing it right they managed to fuck it up further.

Now the scale goes from -3 to 12. I want to cry.

-3 Given for the highly unacceptable performance
0 Given for the unacceptable performance
2 Given for the acceptable performance
4 Given for the average performance
7 Given for the good performance a little above average
10 Given for the excellent result
12 Given for the exceptionally excellent result

The geniuses even provided the students (and parents) a little matrix where they can “translate” the new scale to the old:

I gotta hand it to USA for once. They got it right. No crazy numbering but only a logical row of letters from A to F (or E in some cases).

But no no Europe. Don’t learn from others. Just focus on making it more complicated.