(no subject)

[doyle]

Hmm. Looking through some old BBF discussion and I saw this comment by Gyrus (whose LJ handle I forget, sorry):

(For example, I recently read a fic in which something bad happens and Giles tries to tell Buffy that there was no way she could have anticipated it. She replies, "But I should've done!" That just looks weird to a Yank like me.)

I'm sure I'm guilty of using that myself. Why's it wrong? Should it be 'shoulda' instead of should've?

...any other glaring errors any of you have noticed non-Americans making? Because god knows I could go on for pages in obsessive Brit-picking of both Harry Potter fics and Buffy fics set in England (the language thing I get, but some of the cultural stuff, the 'my character's British so they've never heard of ___' : we do have pizzas and action movies and strange flavours of chips/crisps in Britain and Ireland, I promise you)

Comments

Re: sorta off-topic

[thisficklemob.livejournal.com]

Well, in most schools you get a letter grade every quarter, or least every semester. In my school, we also had "progress reports" which were filled out by hand by the teachers rather than mass-printed by the school. They were less formal, but let you know where you stood. Often a parent has to sign a report card (or progress report) and the kid has to turn it back in, to ensure the parents are aware of their kid's grades. Some schools hand them out in homeroom, others mail them.

The grades usually go A, B, C, D, and F. Some schools give A+s, but most give -s on every grade except F and +s on every grade but A. An A would often be 95-100%, an A- 90-95%, (assuming no A+s)... B+ is around 87-90%, B 84-86%, B- 80-83%, etc. Anything under 60% is an F. For things like papers which have less to do with percent correct, A range is excellent, B good, C fair, D poor, F failing (usually for not doing the assignment at all). C is supposed to be the average grade, but since parents don't like that much, in both high school and college the median is often in the B range. Plenty of teachers also give harder tests and then curve them... so in a given math class, you could get 60% of the questions right, but still get a B or A, if that was one of the better scores.

Every teacher decides for themself how their grading system works, and how everything is weighted. A class might be 30% exams (in my school, two hour scheduled tests twice a year), 30% tests, 20% quizzes (which are given more often and are short), and 20% homework and participation. But it totally depends on the class and the teacher – some teachers grade notebooks, English and history classes usually have papers, lab sciences may have lab reports, foreign languages may give more weight to participation, etc. And teachers can, at their discretion, give a higher grade than a person's actual average, if their work is improving, or if they've done extra credit work.

Confused yet? GPA is the numerical average of all your report card/end of semester grades during a semester, a year, or all four years of high school or college. Generally speaking, an A is a 4.0, a B is a 3.0, a C is a 2.0, a D is a 1.0 and an F is a 0.0. Classes that are longer – like lab sciences – may be more heavily weighted in the averaging. Classes like gym are usually not averaged in.