Hi there, 
I am wondering about about how a high school student in the 1930's
would be graded at the end of the year - would they have used the
system of grades in which stdents are evaluated A/B/C/D or would they
have been given a number?

For example, if, in 1935, an adult asked a teenager how her marks
were, would she respond by saying "B's" or would she say 87? Or
something else?

Thank you very much!!

Hi elizabethdeveer,

Thank you for an interesting question.  


The History of Grading in Three Minutes By: Marita Moll, Head,
Research and Technology
http://www.ctf-fce.ca/en/press/1998/PR30.HTM

"In North America, as the population shift to large urban centers
spelled the demise of the one room schoolhouse in the early 1900?s,
one of the ?efficiencies? created by the new administrative
bureaucracies was the neatly printed, uniform report card.  In 1911, 
researchers testing the reliability of the marks entered on these
cards showed that the same material could be assigned widely different
marks depending on the markers.  However, the research findings
changed nothing because the graded report card had taken firm root.

In the years from 1911 to 1960, school systems experimented with
various letter and number reporting conventions.  Percentage grading
was the most popular system during the latter half of the 19th and the
early part of the 20th century.  In this system the teacher assigned
each student a number between 0 and 100, the number supposedly
reflecting the percentage of the material that the student had
learned.  However, the full scale was hardly ever used because marks
below 50 were rarely assigned and the difficulties of narrowing down
to a single percentage point led to the grouping of scores in
multiples of five.  Eventually, most educational institutions switched
from numerical to letter grades, which represented groups of
percentages, during the 1930?s and 1940?s.  In the 1960?s, the
struggle to humanize schools pushed some institutions to move to
simple pass/fail options and written evaluations.  However, recent
surveys have shown that letter grades (A,B,C,D,F)  remain  the most
common grading practice currently in use in elementary/secondary
schools."

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Keyword search:

report card grading system origins

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Best regards,
tlspiegel

You people are so good! Thank you very much, this is perfect.

Hi elizabethdeveer,

Thank you for the nice rating, comments, and tip!  :)

Best regards,
tlspiegel