Grading System

Romania	Denmark	ECTS	best/next
10	12	A	10%
9	10	B	25%
8	7	C	30%
7	4	D	25%
6
5	02	E	10%
4	00	Fx
3	-2	F
2
1

The oral Danish exam is made of two parts and one of them consists of a 2.5min monologue on a topic that has something to do with Denmark. In order to train for it, we practiced talking for that amount of time, but on a different subject. Therefore I presented once a comparison between the Romanian and Danish education system. And while I was preparing for that, one thing in particular caught my attention. Now, with the exam around, I remembered it and I decided it is worth sharing.

Well, it has to do with the grading systems in the two countries, which are, as you can probably imagine, quite different from one another. And I think the big difference comes from how much a student is punished or rewarded for a bad or good grade, respectively. In the table to the left you can see the two systems and what they correspond to in the ECTS grading scale.

Now let’s see what average someone gets with an A and a C. Logic says it should be a B. In the Romanian system it corresponds to the average of 10 and 8, which is 9 = B. In Denmark, however, the average is… 9.5 which is close, but not really a B. The reason for that is that the distance from A to B is bigger than the one from B to C and therefore a student gets penalized more for a lower grade than it gains from a good one. I think this is particularly unfortunate when one needs an average of 10 for whatever… To take it even further, if one has 4As and 3Cs, the average should be somewhere above B, while in Denmark it’s not even a B! So the morale? Do not get small grades in Denmark…