Yay! It's possible

[swagmaster420x]

After a long period of absence from this forum, I have come back to say that all the dreams I could have had came true last semester. I.e., I got a 4.0 at a university where it's really quite far from easy to do so and in a region of study widely accepted as the most intensive/difficult. Hooray! If this number drops changes at all I may kill myself

[Bob]

Congrats.

How much of that is just doing whatever extra crap to achieve the 4.0 part though?  I noticed the curve goes up, the amount of work, just go from 95% up to the 98% up to 99% up to 99.9%, etc.

I started going for breadth, as many courses as possible after a while, not aiming for the 100% anymore. 

One because it's music and the 100% doesn't mean much.  And to be more marketable job-wise. 

If you're hitting 100% like that, how much extra effort is it to hit the top do you think?

[swagmaster420x]

Thanks. To answer, I was definitely NOT hitting 100%. At my school you basically have to beat a curve. If you beat it, e.g. get within top 10-20% of class, you'll get an A which counts for a 4.0. Having 99% is an A+ and pretty much ridiculous, probably rank 1 in a class of 150. Doesn't mean I'm not aiming that high though. Still, just getting within the A range is difficult, because there are a ton of smart people.

You said the higher you go the harder each grade percentage increment is to earn. I agree to an extent. Grades are largely determined by midterm/final scores - if you can find a way to consistently improve on those, your grade will see noticeable jumps. Getting that 100%, as you were saying, is perceived as inhuman and essentially impossible because our tests are quite hard. But I feel I haven't capped out, and don't think I ever will in the foreseeable future, in the sense of hitting a block and giving up on trying to get even better than before.

[Bob]

Sucking up to the professor essentially.  I noticed a lot of them are really compelled to find something wrong with an assignment and won't ever give full credit.  I didn't think it was worth the effort for that garbage when I could take another class with that time (or just sit in on a class, nice trick there).  Some amount of the top percentage of the grade seemed to be what the professor though about you, if they liked you, etc. 

Congrats again though.

[swagmaster420x]

Sucking up to the professor essentially. 

: P  Don't think that would work in my case. My CS class was 1200 people, physics class 200 people, math class 500 people. Professors have no kind of time to individually deal with students in such quantities (although some professors, I think, tell you at the beginning of the semester they will let you make a case for a grade raise if your scores show a trend of improvement). Anyways, homework for sciences is graded extremely impartially (for math we had no assignments at all => grade entirely determined by tests. Physics = online homework grader. CS = if your code works you get points. Lol.) . And tests are tests.

 My lit teacher liked me though. Bizarre coincidence was that we both went to the same high school (that high school is far, far away from my university). Did you go to school in America, Bob?

[Bob]

I have and still am in a way.