I graduated in New York in 2009. Well is US, almost everything that you do in the courses counts toward the final grade. Here's the typical grading policy and grade distribution in my engineering course:

5% - attendance
5% - final presentation
10% - weekly quizzes
10% - weekly homework
15% - Exam 1
15% - Exam 2
15% - Exam 3
25% Final exam

> 93% = A (4.00)
90 - 92 = A- (3.67)
87 - 89 = B+ (3.33)
83 - 86 = B (3.00)
80 - 82 = B- (2.67)
76 - 79 = C+ (2.33)
70 - 75 = C (2.00)
65 - 69 = C- (1.67)
60 - 64 = D+ (1.33)
55 - 59 = D (1.00)
< 55 = F

Most lecturers know that it's a pain in the ass to give 100% commitment to your courses in the whole semester, so they offer things that can raise your grade such as:

1. you can miss 2 classes without grade penalty
2. you can drop 1 exam with lowest grades so the final will count more towards the final grade
3. you can do optional assignment
4. you can get 5% bonus score if you attend all classes
5. etc.

So you can judge how hard/easy is it to get good grades in US. Overall I'd say that it's EASY and FUN but the most important thing is don't miss any assignment. One assignment could reduce you final grade by 0.5% but if you keep missing it, like me, at the end it will be very hard to get A. They really encourage group work and discussion so almost in every class you'll have 1-3 partners.

I did that most of the time. We can download textbook solution from internet, buy solution from cramster.com or get past assignment solution from friends/fraternity. I have to stress that I'm not encouraging anyone to do that; the best thing to do is do the assignment ourselves and meet the TA/professor if we need help.

Yes you're right, the difficulty of US schools varies greatly. Some schools are easy but their programs don't really have good reputation & their rankings are not that good. Sometimes there are too many grad students & nerds in your course, so the professor won't curve the grade.

From my experience, I think education in US is easy because of their system that counts everything that I do in the whole semester..that forced me to keep paying attention to the courses, do my all my work on time and always be ready for exam. Contrary to education in some other countries, I know some friends who don't study and leave their assignment till the end of semester and in the final 2-3 weeks, they suffer so bad with book and papers all around their rooms.

In my uni students answers in class quizzes using clickers(or simply remote control for those who don't know). The right/wrong answers doesn't matter, but answering it indicates that you're attending the class so u won't get penalized. And MOST professors requires students to submit in class problems. If you don't go to class, then you'll definitely lose some points. For lab activities, the lab note must me submitted after the lab & students must present their experiment result in the lab to verify that they did things in the right way. Sometimes the professors want students to write a feedback for all their group mates, so if you skip classes to often they people will write shit things about you and it will affect your grade. Of course if you go to silly university then everything is easier.

Maybe in universities where the learning is all from lectures, no activities, then skipping lectures won't cause grade penalty.

Don't be too harsh by saying the % breakdown is misleading. I wrote it to tell people how they require students to give commitments to all class activities/assignments in order to get good grade. Grading policy may vary depending on the professor..but I'm just trying to say that in US, it's very rare to find courses that give too much grades from the final exam/assignments (such as 100% from the final exam, or 50% final report + 50% final exam). There are courses that only count 1-2 exams for the final grade, but typically they are silly (and easy) 1-2 credit elective courses.

This post has been edited by gjoy993: Mar 18 2010, 03:53 AM