My family went through a huge debate over the 7 point scale back when I transferred from Bishop England to Wando. I was somewhat of a "slacker overachiever," meaning that as long as I had an A, 90-100, I could care less what number it actually was.
When I transferred, and not for any bad reason, my class at Wando was the first class to roll through on the 7 point scale. But instead of using a conversion formula to convert from BE's scale to the Public scale, they automatically slapped new labels on all of my grades and my gpa and rank dropped a good amount of numbers. Furthermore, they told me that the only thing I could do to fix it was to get BE to send over a transcript of just letter grades, at which point they would convert every A to a 96 numerical grade...putting their students at a great disadvantage to anyone coming in. It still doesn't make sense to me today...they could screw with me...or screw with their own students. A conversion formula takes like 5 minutes to come up with, and a program to do it, in basic Java, would be just as easy.
What was worse though was when I would be sitting in my Calculus class and get a test back with a 92 on it and a B+ on the page. But I could look next to me at the senior's page with the same score and s/he has an A on the page. I took the same test, got the same score...but don't get the same credit. Granted, this isn't a problem anymore because everyone's on the scale in public schools...but man did it suck while I was there.
These, of course, are all "high class" problems, but they illustrate how ridiculous the whole thing got.
But either way, a 7 point scale doesn't make any sense to me anyway. Every school, private or public, I went to in California and in Charleston, up until Wando, used the 90-100 scale (the 10 point scale). So what's the point in using a 7 point scale? Did someone just randomly spin a dial and pick a number?
