[anonymoushn]

Scaling the ranges doesn't fix things for the students. At my high school, some electives only awarded grades up to 4 and others were offered in flavors that went up to 5 or 5.5. Every foreign language actually spoken by modern humans had the first year offered with grades up to 4 only, so optimal play was to take Latin or take Spanish 1 in summer school since that counts for qualifying for Spanish 2 but does not contribute to your GPA. Most kids took Latin because they had lives.

[olliej]

If you want insane you should look at the old sixth form certificate system in NZ - each school is allocated a set of grades to assign to kids based on the grades the prior year got from school certificate. As in say your school got 5 As, 5 Bs, 5 Cs, etc in school certificate exams (the nationwide standard tests from when you are 15), then your school would get 5 1s, 5 2s, etc (1 being the best). Then the school gets to choose how those available grades are distributed - so say the 5 As came from math exams, the school could allocate all the 1s to the English department, so the best grade you could get in 6th form cert outside of the English department would be a 2. I had a friend who was a super talented musician, but his highest possible grade in 6th form music was a 3. Despite getting essentially As across the board in school cert music his best 6th form cert grade for music was notionally a C+/B- or some such.

Given you could get into uni on a high enough 6th form cert grade this is obviously absurd (I think that it was something like your total score for your best 4 subjects had to be less than 6, so you can see how one course consuming 3 points even if you were absolutely perfect screws that)