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Nostradamus wrote: Another one for the cultural translation file; most American schools give a letter grade with a '+' or '-' modifier, based on the percentage score. Being a shameless grade-whore, I always did the extra credit questions and thus sometimes scored over 100%.

Ahhh. I see. The gradings in the UK don't do that for formal exam marks. U (ungraded - fail, in normal terms). Then I think it's a G, F, E, D, C, B, A, A*. None of that +/- thing. That's for GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education, taken at age 16). Usually people do 8 or 9 subjects. A-levels (A for Advanced) range from A-E and that's it, and are taken aged 18, non-compulsory. Usually people do 3 subjects in more depth.

Nostradamus wrote: While I'm thinking of it, what is an 'O-level'? I hear that on a lot of Brit-coms.

An O-level (O is for 'Ordinary' - ) was the precursor to the modern GSCE, and was taken at age 16 too. I think normally you took 5-6 subjects but they were before my time so I'm not entirely sure. People argue that they were more difficult but I'm thinking it's because there were less of them so they packed in more content.

Progression on to A-levels depends how well you did at GSCE (or O-Levels if you're older).

Just to confuse matters, it's changed since I was at school and I understand that you can now embark on an AS (Advanced Supplementary) level which is the same difficulty level as an A-level but half the content. You start off taking 6 of these and take exams at the end of the year. The idea is that you find the ones you're good at and continue them for another year, making it an A-level. You drop the ones you score less highly in, til you've got 3 A-levels just like normal.
I think.

Nothingman wrote:The thing I remember the most is my teacher always said "Science Fiction is the only genre that deals with reality". I never realised that untill then, and then I understood that good SciFi always asks a fundamental question about our reality. The irony is many people view it as the furthest genre from reality, close minded fools. I guess I just played my geek card.

Please, keep on playing it. I wish there'd been guys like you in some of my classes. So many of them were ultra conservative, afraid of anything remotely different. I mean, what was the point?

This post reminded me, totally random: I have always wanted to write an essay comparing Sidney Carton's life-long devotion to Lucy (A Tale of Two Cities) to Forrest Gump's life-long devotion to Jenny.

Discuss.

Nostradamus wrote:Another one for the cultural translation file; most American schools give a letter grade with a '+' or '-' modifier, based on the percentage score. Being a shameless grade-whore, I always did the extra credit questions and thus sometimes scored over 100%.

At my middle school and high school, our grades were strictly letter grades without any pluses or minuses (on tests and papers, teachers would sometimes write in a plus or minus to indicate which range of the grade you were on, but as far as final grades were concerned, there were only letters). When I began college, grades were the same way. A few years ago (well, more than five years ago), I remember several schools switching to include +/- in official transcripts. They always try to make it sound like the pluses and minuses will help your GPA.

Megs wrote:This post reminded me, totally random: I have always wanted to write an essay comparing Sidney Carton's life-long devotion to Lucy (A Tale of Two Cities) to Forrest Gump's life-long devotion to Jenny.

Discuss.

heh that's a good one!

In a similar vein, my friend and I have discussed a compare/contrast study of Jordan Catalano and Winnie Cooper as fantasy objects.

I see more of a comparison between Winnie Cooper and Joey Potter from Dawson's Creek. The perfect, unatainable girl next door that the title character is unnaturaly infatuated with for the greater part of their lives.

Uh, edited b/c I know how to spell "Dawson's".

Well, the only reason we chose Jordan and Winnie is that we loved MSCL and the Wonder Years.

We are not allowed to give +'s or -'s. It is really irritating because there is a huge difference from an 79% and a 70% etc. Parents see a B but really their child had a 80%, and they are up in arms when it drops to a C.