Varying Grade Systems

GITI's education module was written to be very simple, it understands standard letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) as well as a few other concepts (Pass [P], Incomplete [I]), but it doesn't know how to deal with anything other than whole letters on a 4 point scale. Currently this is hard coded in GITI, and there is no flexible grading system stuff available. Perhaps this was short sighted when I originally wrote GITI. When I think about it, there are a lot of problems here, including the absence of understanding for "Credit By Exam" grades... those are currently handled as "Pass" with a note on the course's record. Yet another area I have missed is "Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory" grading as might apply for a graduate program.

There are just too many grade systems to try to adapt for, so maybe on GITI's next update I should bring in the ability to attach a grading system to each course using the fields module (which has handled way too few things lately). It would be cool to let the thing use a different scale attached to each school (but fall back to standard 4.0 when none is specified). I had a way not fun trip through the website for the UNC Registrar's office the other day, finding stuff like graduate programs that use grades like H (High Pass), HP (Above Average), L (Low Pass). Each school at UNC has its own grading system. It would be impossible to interpret all of these possible systems and integrate them into GITI, so a per-school system input would be the only way to make this work.

When did it become so hard to just get an "A"?

I just hope I don't have to figure out how to tell GITI how to handle the possibility of me getting an "A-" in Digital Photo.