18.11.06 distinction!

Like everything else at Oxford, grades are weird, non standardised with anybody else in the world, and subject to a lot of debate.  In the US, students get grades based on fairly straightforward percentages <60%(F) is a fail, <70% (D) is a really bad and you’ll get kicked out of your university if you keep it up , <80%(C) is totally average and you won’t get into your degree program if you average a C across degree related courses, <90% (B) is pretty good… so good for you, and <100%(A) is kick-ass.  Anyone getting 100% or more is a freak, trying to get into Harvard, or maybe wants to become an academic.  However, it IS totally possible to get 100% in a class, which makes sense, given the whole PERCENTAGE concept.  And since teachers often give extra assignments, extra points test questions, an etc. so folks on the low end of the scale can boost their score, the freaks have an opportunity to get 102% or whatever.  On the other end of the scale, you can easily end up with 40%, 20%, or even 0% if you don’t show up for the test, are totally high, never studied, etc. 

No so at Oxford (big surprise).

Here, grades are given on a scale of 40% to 80%. That’s right, forty PERCENT to eighty PERCENT (why not just make ten one louder?).  50% in a class is a passing grade.  <50% means you failed and have to take the class again (called a re-sit).  50% to 59% is a semi indication that you squeaked by and also semi suck, while 60% to 69% is considered typical, and 70% and above is called a “distinction”.  This means you kicked butt, and if you got grades like that all the time, you get to eat at some special dinner with the dean once a quarter, or whatever.  These percentages apparently also translate into later (british) life because what overall percentage you get lets you list on your resume whether or not you got 1st, 2nd, and whatever else honours, but this is mainly where super anal firms are concerned (sees below).  This system was recently explained to me by a guy in my crew boat, but I don’t remember all the details.  The funny thing about these percentages is that nobody who actually turns in a paper or exam ever gets less than a 40%, and usually, a dismal failure is a 45%.  Oh yeah, the business school also seem to only give out grades in increments of 5%, so, there is no getting 63.4%.  An 80% is something that happens once to a couple of super genius people a term per class: it’s totally rare.  85% and up simply do not happen, end of story.  Except for maybe once in the history of the business school or something like that. 

Why do it like this?  Here’s what I think:

1. Keeping top scores low makes the distribution of scores look normal (mba talk!) without having to hand out super low grades… that is, the grades look like they have a pretty even spread from 45 to 80, but almost everybody gets to pass, because 50 is where the passing grades start off.  They really don’t want to weed out students from an mba school the way they do in certain US undergrad programs, so they force a curve where everybody looks pretty good.

2. They like it to look like Oxford is sooooooo hard that just getting 50% of what an Oxford prof asks you on a test is good enough for mere mortals.

3. They don’t like to ask questions with really direct clearly right/wrong answers.  This is very different from all of my US schooling, but may be typical at US mba programs, I don’t know (chime in via comments if anybody out there has an opinion on this).  Back home, questions always had clear answers, they were either right or wrong, and often, they were multiple guess, even if you had to do a lot of work to get to the multiple guess answers.  Here, there is a lot of context and potential for elaboration which leaves room for you to get 3/5 marks (that’s what they call points here: marks) for answering something correctly, but not demonstrating your deep knowledge in a verbose way.  If that makes any sense.  They also seem to give out a couple of marks for trying, even though you’re wrong (more evidence that they don’t like to fail mbas).

Anyway, the point of this whole bit is that I got a Finance paper back with a 70%, which is a distinction, and means I kicked butt.  It sounds pretty lame if you don’t know all the crazy Oxford details behind it, but there you go, it’s a great score.  This is an especially big deal for me because 1) I totally suck at Finance, and it is really really hard for me, 2) I thought I was going to fail this assignment, and was really relieved and 3) I decided early that my goal here was to learn a lot, meet a lot of connections, have a swell time at Oxford, and get the minimum passing grade.  I seriously don’t give a shit about getting distinctions, honours, gold stars, or any other BS like that, I’m just not at a place in life where stuff like that drives what I do.  Plus, no one that I’m going to deal with in the real world is going notice or care if I got honours or not.  I should qualify that statement a bit: there are indeed some firms, as mentioned above, particularly big management consulting and investment banking firms, who are quite serious about what your honours are, kind of like how some companies back in the states care if you were valedictorian or want to know your GPA, etc.  These are also the companies that make you do 7 interviews before offering you a job.  The same companies that give you a bunch of crazy math problems, case studies, tests, and whatever else as part of the interview process.  The same companies that seriously expect you to work 80 hours a week, EVERY week, FOR EVER. 

I don’t want to work for these companies. 

This is for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that anyone that anal is going rub me the wrong way, and I probably wouldn’t enjoy working for them anyway.  So, I got a distinction, it was cool, I was surprised… but it’s really no biggie, and not something I’m going to purposely try to repeat in the future. 

 

Even so, I did feel pretty good about it. 

 

this is the view from our deck, it’s been stormy lately