So Brooke and I are both going to school.  She’s wrapping up her bachelor’s degree at DeVry mainly online with a class or two on campus.  She has literally had like 102% in classes when she’s done.  She is very competitive and works very hard to maintain an excellent GPA.  Since she went back to finish her degree after getting her AA originally she has not got a single letter grade other than A.  She gets certificates in the mail for the President’s/Dean’s list or something like that.  They flow in like water!  It’s unreal but only to be expected, she works very hard and is very dedicated.  She has a standard A/B/C grading system cut off at 90/80/70 like you’ve always known.  When I went to ASU for my undergrad degree it was the same thing.

Now I’ve been going to CSU for two semesters; summer and fall.  I took a database course in the summer and got something like a 98.5% and it was recorded as an A.  I took Object Oriented Development (CS414) and Parallel Programming (CS475) this semester.  I know I got something like an 88% in 414 which turns out to be an A-.  That’s an A MINUS!  Same thing in 475, A-.  So my 4.0 is now a 3.7ish.  My problem here is two fold: The new +/- system sucks but there is no reward to do exceedingly well and get an A+.  I can do no better than a 4.0 so A is as good as it gets.

Now to truly appreciate this you need to know me as a young college kid the first time around.  I didn’t valiantly march through school with nothing but honors.  In fact, I barely made it through…it was more or a battered and bruised half-hearted slide to home plate.  I have a saying that Cs get Degrees.  I racked up more Cs than anyone around.  I had one lone A in my ASU undergrad.  ONE!  And it was a group project and we had some idiot savant who had it done in the second week of a 16 week course.  We spent 14 weeks going through the motions.  I had a D too, in MAT342, linear algebra.  Wasn’t a core course, so it was kosher.  I had some Bs, in fact my CSE421 class with Dr. David Pheanis was my crowning achievement.  I had the third best grade on the final in a course which was widely considered the hardest course in the ASU undergrad curriculum throughout the school, not just the CSE program.  Anyway, I wrapped up that degree with a 2.42 or so.  No one ever asked for my GPA, so Cs still got degrees and jobs!

So, now I’m doing better, I appreciate it more, I understand the material better now that I’ve worked in the field for almost 8 years.  I care, I don’t know why, but I care.  I want to do well.  I was happy to see two As, even if it was tempered with disappointment for seeing a minus next to both.  And on a side note, I see Dr Pheanis isn’t teaching anymore which is truly a tragedy.  I never understood why he did what he did or the reason for many seemingly pointless assignments.  I always thought he was an ego maniac and a jerk.  He’s not, he was one of the most skilled professors in the CS department at ASU.  Between 421 and 438 I learned how to write, not perfect but I got a lot better.  All the while I learned the fundamentals of a computer.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve explained the fundamentals of a switch/case statement to “Software Engineers” who have no idea how it’s implemented in languages like C as they deal in VB.

So +/- grading systems, thumbs down.  Dr Pheanis and the teachers like him who have a method to their madness even if we can’t see it right away, thumbs up.