P/F grading

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arc5005

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What does this actually mean? What is considered pass for a class? is it generally school/class specific, and what is it based off of? I've never taken a P/F type of class before, so I'm curious what this means. Doesn't the school need to still provide a class rank for residency programs?
 
Doesn't the school need to still provide a class rank for residency programs?

No. There are schools that don't have ranking at all, although most P/F schools do have an internal ranking that gets released to residencies.

What do you mean "what does this actually mean?" It's not that difficult. A P/F system is exactly what it sounds like... if you score above a certain percent in the class (generally 70) then you passed the class and that is what goes on your transcript
 
No. There are schools that don't have ranking at all, although most P/F schools do have an internal ranking that gets released to residencies.

What do you mean "what does this actually mean?" It's not that difficult. A P/F system is exactly what it sounds like... if you score above a certain percent in the class (generally 70) then you passed the class and that is what goes on your transcript

I guess I was asking more specifically what numerical value do most programs use as the cut off for pass/fail.
 
I'm guessing P/F works differently at every school. At my school, we know what % of the questions we got right the moment we submit the exam, but we don't find out the pass score until a few days later after the faculty calculates it based on overall class performance. Our exams tend to be pretty difficult, and the pass score for the first one of the semester was a whopping 58, so it really just depends on the difficulty of the exam and how the class as a whole does rather than there being a standard cutoff.
 
My school has a true pass/fail system during the first 2 years and they take it so seriously that we not only don’t know what we actually made on an exam, but we also don’t know the median score. All we get is a report 2 weeks after an exam that says we passed and another report that says the percentage of the class that passed. Our test are different than most schools though, they are entirely short answer with no multiple choice, so we really have no clue what the rubric looks like from the professors (AKA everyone thinks they bombed the exams because they are so difficult, yet most of us pass).

Even if a school is P/F, better believe someone is keeping track of things somewhere.. they’re always watching. Especially professionalism at my school..
 
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