Over at the Dumbing of Age Book 6 Kickstarter, there is a new GALASSO MAGNET tier! At 3″x5″, this is the biggest magnet I’ve ever produced! (Galasso is a big guy.) He will put all those other puny magnets in their place!
There’s also a new PICK THREE MAGNETS tier where you can, surprise, pick any three magnets unlocked by this Kickstarter campaign! You’ll be able to tell me which three magnets you want in your address survey, given out some time after the Kickstarter funds. So if you’re pledged for, like, a LESLIE/ROBIN magnet set, but also want Galasso, you can edit your pledge accordingly!
When the Kickstarter hits $45k (which it might have done already by the time this publishes), I will publish a sneak preview of a strip from JUNE for y’all. It won’t be, like, a spoilery one, but something more self-contained. But you have a choice between three strips, for which there’s a poll on the right hand side of the website under the comic strip. You can choose which future strip you want based on which characters appear in it. When I figure the poll has given me a clear answer, I’ll post the strip over on the Kickstarter and you can choose to go look at it if you want! Again, they’re not spoilery, so no one’s gonna be able to read them, come back over here, and post OMFG JOYCE IS DEAD or whatever.
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WHAT NO WAY, THAT’S NOT A REAL GRADE
*head a splode*
PinocchioFaceDownInWater.gif
huh, I thought you’d used that title before
I did not see that coming.
I did not see that cliff coming.
It’s okay because that one was in sign language
I know, right? 76% What real professor would go out of their way to give a grade that unnecessarily precise?
WHOA!
A B-! How horrible!
Actually, it’s a C
In America, that’s a D
In Canada, that’s an Eh.
Your north americans really have weird-arse grading systems
So which one of them got the “bad” grade? Is it her, or did she discover her boyfriend is struggling?
He told her already. That’s gotta be her.
Lots of letters all based on a numeric system. The question stays, why are you using these letters(that you can’t even agree on a standard for) if you are basing them on numbers? Stick to numbers and everything is clear and universal o_o
You’d think that, but a friend of mine taught over in the US for a while and got into trouble because here in Ireland we don’t grade on a curve at all and 40% is a pass.
So his entire class “failed” by American standards.
*slowclap*
Even if you’re using a 95 cutoff for an A, the cutoff for a C would be 75.
And almost nobody does that anyway.
Not in any class i’ve ever been in. High school that’s a low C(75-79), and college it’s either a middle C (70-79), or a low B. I’ve never seen anything that considers that a D.
Wut. You have stricter grading in high school? Here we have 5 grades, from 51% is passing (2 or “E”/”D”), then from 61% it’s a 3, from 71% a 4 and from 81% a 5. In high school you usually pass above 25%.
51% is passing?
May I ask, where are you?
The UK College system or as we call it university. Over that would still be a first.
70+ 1st Class (A-B)
60+ Upper 2nd Class (C)
50+ Lower 2rd Class (D)
40+ Third (E-F)
39- Fail
Assuming those are the UK letter grades and not the US equivalents. For study abroad grade transfers back to the US, it’s usually a pretty strict 70+ = A- or A.
Upper 2nd usually transfers to the US as a B/B+, lower 2nd as a C to B-. If I remember right from my semester in Edinburgh (admittedly 10 years ago now), classes I got 70-72ish in transferred as A-.
I think it may basically be all other “developed” countries? I know NZ, Australia, UK and Sweden. I assumed Canada would be in line with the rest of the world and Wikipedia tells me this is the case. 50% as a pass is *normal*.
I only found out about the US’ horrendous grading system last year and that… explains a lot. :/
As an old UKian I still need it explaining to me. A ‘C’ is bad in American? Not a pass? And not passing one test is a bad thing? Or is this just an over-achiever thing?
It’s a pass, but not a good one. Low enough that it’s not going to be good for someone looking to transfer out to an elite school.
One such probably isn’t a big deal, but if it’s the start of a trend …
Yeah, 2.1 grades transfer as a B/B+ in the US, if you do a study abroad, for example. A “C” in the US is a low 2.2 in UK terms.
It feels as though if you’re retaining only half the material, that’s not really acceptable…?
I’m Canadian, in Quebec you need 60% to pass. School systems vary by province, though, and Quebec was the only one I went to school in.
In the US typically you need at least 60% to pass in high school (most public high schools D’s are passing) and 70% is passing in University (where a D is not considered passing, especially for fulfillment of prerequisites)
weird, here in Texas anything below a 70 is failing, once you hit 75 that’s c territory, 80-89 is b and 90 and above is a’s.
for highschool anyways
Remember that test difficulty is calibrated so that most competent people will pass, so in theory someone who would score a 70 in Texas should only get 60 in highschools in other states that use 60 (because the tests there should be proportionately harder).
It depends on the major*. The increments of 10 are a baseline, and C requirements are pretty common (although B and D requirements show up, with D requirements cropping up a lot in classes that aren’t prerequisites for other classes). That increment of 10 can get really stretched though – I’ve taken classes where the C line was in the 40s somewhere, because the professor preferred scaling the class that way to writing tests that weren’t supposed to average in the low 50s.
*As just one example, Physics is pretty infamous in a lot of universities for being designed around incredibly brutal tests where 40% is a pretty decent score.
That was my experience as a physics major. The argument being, as it was explained to me, that with more spread at the top end, it’s easier distinguish between the better students than when the entire class is crammed into ~40% of the scale.
And to make it even more confusing…art school (at least mine, dunno if they’re all the same) is totally different!
Since you’re being graded on a somewhat subjective type of work (art) percentages aren’t typically used and each teacher kinda has their own “system” for how they assign grades. Doing the bare minimum, i.e. the student completed the project on time and followed instructions, would usually earn a D or C, and then anything higher was awarded somewhat subjectively based on the teacher’s view on how successful the project was at demonstrating the artist’s understanding of the skills being taught or their ability to express what the project is intended to convey (i.e. how effectively did they use color, is the message of the piece clear, is the anatomy accurate, is it well-rendered, etc?)
If I recall, at LCAD we also had this system where a C- (or maybe a D+?) was generally passing, but you had to get a C+ or higher in any courses that were core components of your major. So basically, if you were an illustration major and got a C- in Fundamentals of Animation, that was okay, but if you got a C- in Rendering (a core class for the Illustration majors) you had to repeat the class.
(It’s funny how often people unfamiliar with it portray art school as this lackadaisical easy thing when in most art students’ experience is it pretty brutal) XD
Also it may have been a B- to pass core classes actually. I don’t remember…college was too long ago.
At my uni for the most part it’s like 10 pts per anything above an F (so F is under 60, then D is 60-69, C is 70-79, etc). D is considering “passing, but good luck getting into any sort of grad/law/med school lololol.” Also, each professor can change the scale at their leisure (so 75 could very well be a B- if the professor says so).
Oh, and don’t even get me started on profs who curve. Uuuuggghhhh. Then anything can be anything. A D could be an A, and an A could be a C, fuck curves.
As someone who did some night-school Instruction, plotting the curve does help you gauge your communication skills. What is disheartening is when you see a double bell curve.
51% would be passing? Wow standards have dropped since I was in school.
A was 93-100
B was 86-92
C was 78-85
D was 70-77
Anything below was a lovely fail.
Depends on who your teacher is. 30 years ago my dad got the second highest grade one one of his honors accounting assignments with the amazing score of 0% with the class average being something around -40%
It is likely just a different school system. I live in the UK and a pass for most individual things and exams is 50% (only a couple were 60%). In my current Uni, it is 40% average and above is a pass. However, that doesn’t mean it is easy or that the standards are low, it comes down to it being a very different system where they know how tough it is and mark accordingly and give a pass rate accordingly.
America’s marking system is still brutal and ridiculous in comparison though considering generally the max quantity of info you can absorb from a lesson is approximately 70% which my high school stressed a lot to encourage studying.
Theoretically US exams should be easier to compensate. I have no idea if this is the case.
If the worst C students are able to finish three quarters of the questions in a math test within the allotted time, the exam isn’t difficult enough. Just saying.
95% for A is also ridiculous. Getting an A should certify that the student is capable of tackling the very difficult problems at the end of the test which require creative thinking, not that he can reliably solve piss-easy questions without making any blunders.
Yeah, basically once you’re expected to get around the 90s for a remotely decent grade you have shifted the method of learning to rote learning as far as I can see. It sounds actively counter-productive both directly in terms of learning outcomes and indirectly in terms of *crushing people’s spirits*.
It does nothing of the sort. It reflects a difference in testing far more than anything else.
A good teacher can design a test to put the average where ever they want.
Different systems indeed, for most of my non-college schooling it was:
A: 90-100
B: 80-89
C: 70-79
and the rest was Fail, except for when they made a change in my last year of high school and added in
D: 60-69
with anything below 60 was now Fail. There also was +/- varients for all non-Fails, with anything over 100 getting a double plus. I don’t recall seeing anyone posting that, but there’s a lot of text going on here.
Round these parts
90-100 = A
80-89 = B
70-79 = C
60-69 = D, or F if your school doesn’t acknowledge the concept of D.
In my uni it was 100-96 A, 95-90 B (on our national scale those are both ‘excellent’ aka ‘5”), 75-89 C (on our national scale ‘good’ aja ‘4’), and 60-75 D (on our national scale ‘satisfactory’ aka ‘3’ aka lowest passing grade). And everything below 60 was F (on our national scale ‘bad’ aka ‘2’ aka ‘go redo that test/project’)
In our schools there wasn’t a 100 point scale at all, we used just a 12 point one that mapped to the same 2-5 one.
(If you ask me where ‘1’ went… u\/(-_-)\/u to the same place as ‘E’ on y’all’s scale i imagine)
Yet all American schools refuse the concept of E. That always bothers me.
E is excellent on a different grading system, and they don’t want to get them mixed up.
That grading system also includes S for satisfactory, N (or NI) for needs improvement, and U for unsatisfactory.
When I was in school, these grades were still in use for situations where you didn’t get a numerical score at all, like handwriting and citizenship (i.e., how well behaved you were).
At my elementary school, the “here, have a sticker” scale for the behavior grades had O for Outstanding at the top, while the standard “this grade means business” scale had “E for Effort” instead of F, to protect our fragile psyches.
My elementary school used letter grades A, B, C, D, and F and then number grades at like 5th grade.
We also used things like citizenship, helpfulness, etc. using E, G (for good), S, and N for it. No U though, that’s a new one.
Here’s how it was broken up when I was in school (90s northeast US):
A = 90-100
B = 80-89
C = 70-79
D = 60-69
F = 0 – 59
Each block is broken up into thirds for the +/-, so a 67 is a D+ and a 92 is an A-.
Dorothy got a C+.
90s Northwest US I can report the same!
Huh, apparently I only had to read a few more posts.
There used to be an E grade! It used to go A-B-C-D-E, and E was the failing grade. But they pretty soon just figured might as well call it F since it referred to failing anyway 🙂 A reference: http://mentalfloss.com/article/90971/why-there-no-e-grade
We used to have an E in Canada when I was in school in the Eighties as well. I don’t remember what points it corresponded with; but I do remember it was pretty bloody dire and basically meant “Pull your socks up or you’re gonna fail for sure.”
I only can confirm that we had that grade 100% for sure because I remember Mum once encouraging me to try harder with “Remember, A for effort!” and my brother and I told her (probably with a great deal of teenage sarcasm, poor Mum), “No; E for effort. For an A you actually have to pass!” And it made sense because there actually was an E grade.
I don’t remember precisely where the pass/fail mark was back in the day (I thiiink <65 and you failed?) but for the Canadian Ham Radio course, one needs at least a 70% to pass; and for the electronics tests my husband is currently in the middle of with the Canadian military, it's the same: 70% at the minimum to pass.
Only getting 50% of the test correct would be pretty dire and mean you did not fully understand fully half the course material (or simply were not able to complete the test in the time provided), which shouldn't mean a pass, to me. One ought to have a decent grasp of the bulk of the subject, whatever it is, in order to pass.
There is not necessarily such a simple correlation between percentage score on test and percent of material understood. It’s all in the design of the test.
Given a system where 50% was a passing grade (or a good one, for that matter), I would expect very challenging tests that pushed the edges of what a student could be expected to learn in the course.
It can also mean one doesn’t understand the harder parts, while still having a decent enough grasp on the basics to get by. Which, in most classes, is fine. In classes you need to retain more information for safety or specialty reasons (like in electronics or the radio or even some prerequisites), needing higher is fine.
In the 3 Canadian grade schools* I attended, “E” was Excellent, “VG” was Very Good, “S” was Satisfactory, “NS” was Non-Satisfactory, and there was also the dreaded “VNS” – Very Non-Satisfactory.
*Quebec, not speaking for other provinces
Middle schools in Tacoma used ‘E’ instead of ‘F’ when I attended. Of course, that was coming up on 30 years ago…
Not all! Ohio State University has an E (for what would be an f at other schools). Do an En (failing because you stopped attending class).
More schools had “E,” but kids kept convincing their parents it meant “Excellent.” So they axed it.
In UK universities, 76 would be one of the best scores.
40 is 3rd,
50 is 2:2,
60 is 2:1,
70 is 1st.
There’s a rumour that the reason you never see more than a 79% score for a paper is that universities are obliged to publish if they give 80% or more. That’s probably an urban legend though.
I don’t think its true. My wife had a few essays that were marked 80% or higher.
I mean that rumour is definitely false given that several of my friends have gotten over 90% on major pieces of work, and nary a publication in sight. Still, yeah 76% is a very good score and America is messed up.
OK, I grew up in Texas and went to college in New York and this is what I was always taught:
90-100 = A
80-89 = B
75-79 = C
70-74 = D
0-69 = F
Damn, that’s really strict! It’s a good way to motivate kids but sounds incredibly harsh.
Wow that is strict.
My Canadian university called 70s a B and 60s a C.
Just finished a grad degree at Edinburgh where you really have to work for a 70, (A3) and anything over 80 (A2) is considered publishable. Anything over 90 (A1) is not only publishable but likely influential. 60-69 (B) is considered good.
Here in Australia its
HD > 85
D > 75
C > 65
P > 50
and of course less than 50% is a the dreaded F
and if you americans are confused by that the letters stand for Fail, Pass, Credit, Distinction, and High Distinction.
It’s worth noting that different countries have different attitudes towards grades – an 80 in the US wouldn’t be an 80 in the UK; that’s why on my UK master’s 76+ was Dean’s List, and a 40 was still a pass. Marks above 80 would be almost impossible to achieve in the arts, for example, but at that point you’re already at what is called a ‘first.’ Basically, it keeps you humble and reminds you there’s always room to be better.
In my school (I’m a teacher) that’s a C… what’s the scale that calls that a D?
Some parts of the mid-Atlantic use an odd grading scale, where:
100 – A+
99-94 – A
93-86 – B
85-78 – C
77-70 – D
69-0 – Failing/F/E
This is one of the reasons why GPA doesn’t really matter to universities, and they want the full transcript and school info. Some universities also have notes on specific districts, cities and even schools that grape more or less harshly than expected.
note- Went to high school and university in that area, and previously volunteered at registrar for a university.
Huh… that’s an odd scale. For the most part, I’ve seen the “A+” and “D-” eliminated completely (though, I still don’t know why… I think it was part of the “No Child Left Behind” joke from the Bush years.) But the scale I currently know is:
93-100 – A
90-92 – A-
87-89 – B+
83-86 – B
80-82 – B-
77-79 – C+
73-76 – C
70-72 – C-
67-69 – D+
60-66 – D
0-59 – F
Yes, this is the standard US scale. I’m a current PhD candidate and former adjunct prof in the US. But there are definitely places that tweak it or do weird things.
My little sister is in the 5th grade in a charter school in Tennessee. She just got her progress report this week and to them a 76 is a C-, and anything below a 75 is a failing grade. Her 84, which is supposed to be a solid B, counts as C+,
Uh, usually anything in the 70s is a C.
Depends on the school, tho’ but I’d say 90% of schools that’s a C.
In Australia, it is also a D. But that means Distinction, and is considered a pretty good mark. 80+ is a High Distinction, which is as good a grade as you can get
whatg part? D is a failing grade, 76 is a passing mark, not high honors, but passing mark. So, minimum C+ to B- depnding on the local bell curve.
Common scale for grading
100-90 =A
89-80 = B
79-70 = C
69-60 = D
59 and below =F
Not that it really matters, the colleges on Dorothy’s list don’t generally take anyone with less than straight A’s.
Isn’t 70s C-level?
Typically, though it depends on the class’s grading scheme.
We have fifty states and over thirteen thousand school districts, and sometimes you’re lucky to find an entire school district, or even just an entire school, with uniform grading standards. 70s can be lots of things.
Yep, but for someone like Dorothy, it might as well be an F.
100% this
If it ain’t an ‘A’, it’s an ‘F’.
And anything 69 and below is underwater.
…
😀
Maybe a C which is slightly worse but still passing which is all that matters.
Not if you’re trying to transfer.
Still passing isn’t really what you want when you’re looking to transfer to an Ivy League
Not to make light of what could be an existential crisis for Dorothy. I love her. She works very hard and is one of the few characters that generally has their shit together and isn’t blatantly obnoxious or frustrating….but it’s a C. She’s smart. You can easily course correct from a C. Walky’s Super F failing. He’ll be lucky if he even passes his class. She puts too much pressure on herself.
“Puts too much pressure on herself” is kind of Dorothy’s entire current character arc, yeah. And it’s a very real, believable issue- the feeling that anything other than an actually unacheivably and consistent high standard is “I’m a failure” or “I’m not good enough”.
I would love to know where this came from with Dorothy. As in, where in her past was this lesson pushed into her psyche?
There doesn’t actually need to have been a point in her past to push that lesson into her brain, only a regular school system and society.
But it’s more due to her personality, I believe. It’s that, because of her goals and of her knowledge, she KNOWS she can do better. And I believe giving her best to achieve her goals is one of the major things that drives her – it’s why she ended it with Danny as soon as entering college in the first place (and maybe missing feelings. But the goal-thing was the main reason).
And now as she did something interpersonal, helping Walky with his university staff, she got a, in her view, below-her-ability-mark. It’s a big sign for her saying “Overthink your life right now. You’re doing something wrong, you’re losing your goal.” And it’s not just ‘failure’, it’s the fact that her whole plan for life is starting to tip over, as she seems to start losing the ability to balance what is important to her. She’s plainly a perfectionist.
I still don’t understand how she can be such a perfectionist if she didn’t get into Yale in the first place (and why Yale? Shouldn’t an overachiever want Harvard or something?). Or did she apply to uni during a time when she was like super in love with Danny and was like “If he can’t go then I won’t either!!” and didn’t even apply to Yale, and then sometime after the application deadline she was like “omg what have I done?! D: D: D: “
Okay, let’s see:
1. Yale is an incredibly competitive school to get into. I’m sure there are plenty of perfectionists, plenty of 4.0 GPAs, and plenty of valedictorians who do not get into Yale.
2. Why…should she want Harvard over Yale, exactly? They’re both very highly ranked, and may even flip positions depending on which rankings you’re looking at and from which year. Maybe she visited or researched both and liked Yale better.
Yeah Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are the Big 3, so they’re all on the same tier of excellence. The stereotype ahs Harvard being the best ’cause it’s so hard to get into, but I’m pretty sure any Ivy League school would look nice on a resume for president (Our current went to Uni of Penn…. Some people dont even know it’s an ivy league school). Plus you gotta consider campus culture (Yale’s a way bigger party school), costs, programs, area…. Yale maybe fit Dorothy more.
We don’t know what went wrong with Yale. It could have been any number of things.
I mean, we have a perfect example of how, if you want to be a female president, you damn sure have to be better than perfect. Her goals + society = this exact headspace.
Yeah for a perfectionist who is probably used to getting mostly As/probably considers a B less-than-ideal, a C is a devastating grade. And depending on your future schooling/career plans, can have a major impact.
Our society kinda…breeds perfectionism unfortunately.
That’s a D (hence the hidden text joke), and that isn’t passing depending on the class. I had classes where it was a solid C to pass. Not C-
Wait, I can’t read upside down that’s a C. But man wait till she tells her parents about this! I remember lying about my grades.
I suspect her parents will be fine, from what we’ve seen of them. The problem here is Dorothy’s own reaction. She’s potentially upset enough for the whole family.
The hover text says that it ISN’T a D, hence why he considered making her grade lower (so it would be a D and he could make that joke).
Does California have a different grading system from Indiana? Because a 76 is a solid C here in Cally. Of course, you only need a C- (lowest possible to get one of those is 70) in California to pass a class with full credit here as well. You only “need a full C” when it comes to overall institutional GPA here. But, the main point is that this is the second big blow to Dorothy’s self-esteem in as many weeks.
If Dorothy is trying to get into Yale she is gonna need MUCH higher grades than C’s.
In college, so many of my classes effectively functioned on some sort of curve system relative to the mean and standard deviation (mostly in technical classes) that I see that and think, “76/100 on a math class exam? Could totally end up being a B or an A of some sort depending on the test and the context!”
She’s in Calc I or similar though – at least in my experience, the curves don’t get introduced that early. If it was Diff Eq., then that could easily be a B. If it was a grad class, that could easily be an A. Calc I or similar? Less so.
She’s not in the same Math class as Walky and the others. I’m not even sure if she’s taking the same level of Math as they are, just at a different time.
Of course, that grade doesn’t have to be for Math at all. Though it probably is, because Math Is Hard.
She’s not taking the same level math as Walky and the others. When she was helping him, she referred to the math he was on as being something she did previously rather than currently.
A whaaat?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond:
http://www.jcq.org.uk/examination-system/how-grades-are-determined
That’s an A!
Back during my school days (which was heavily based on the British system), the baseline for highest A possible was indeed 75. So congrats Dorothy!
For most of my college classes that would be an A, and one of the highest grades in my class. Though from talking to other students that seems to be largely localized in stem classes.
It’s contagious!
It’s college!
This can’t be good for Walky’s immediate future…
Well it complicates things, but a re-examinations of her plans could wind up with Walky not an expendable diversion until she transfers away.
OTOH, perhaps it will shoot down her Yale aspirations, meaning she’ll stick around in Indiana longer.
Granted, it would be shitty for Walky to root for that to happen.
She was never going to go to Yale. I checked their website and they take a smaller percentage of applicants as transfers than they do in normal admissions and state (for whatever it’s worth) that they don’t take any transfers based just on grades, but only if you’ve done something exceptional to make it worthwhile for Yale to take you. Not to mention even if she could get a 4.0 Indiana was ranked #82 in the latest college rankings. For a lot of purposes that doesn’t matter, but Yale definitely cares, and would want to know why her 4.0 is better than that of the applicants from schools 5-80. For that matter even if she had to stay in Indiana for some reason why couldn’t she get into #60 Purdue? Again, for a lother of purposes #60 vs #82 on US News and world report rankings is utterly immaterial. Gor super ambitious prospective Yale transfer it definicely matters.
Poor Dorothy. 🙁
And the cows have come home to roost
Now I want to see a roosting cow.
Granted.
I prefer my cows roosting on an open fire.
Something seems off about that sentence…
Yeah, it doesn’t mention the jackdaws nipping at your nose… (Sorry Frank)
wat
Campfire songs being sung by the…the…um…
I’ve got nothing.
One of the lesser known symptoms of mad cow disease, they think they’re phoenixes
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/bullshit-2/
There seems to be an echo in here tonight.
OOF. The first C of college was really really hard for me. Your brain says average but your heart says FAILURE.
As Harvey Pekar put it, “Average Is DUMB!”–and we’re well and truly Dumbing Of Age at this point.
Well if everyone else got A’s and B’s, your C would put you below average…
Yeah…though getting a D grade was tantamount to failure and were that the case in the comic, Wills’s proposed alt text would’ve been correct.
I think if Dorothy had gotten a 66 on a test, we might be breaking that no-character-death rule cause she’d have a heart attack.
Or maybe the shock would have made her giggle and chew up the paper.
We may never know.
Oh, Dorothy. Burnout is the worst.
Someone on Patreon brought this up: 76 is kinda the turning point-iest of grades in this strip, ain’t it? It was the same grade Sal was so happy to get after screwing Jason didn’t work and before she started asking Danny for help.
Now I want Sal and Dorothy to interact more, now that Dorothy has too much on her plate to possibly project-ify Sal.
That’s a great parallel!
Isn’t it just?
I want these two to interact so badly. They’d be fun!
And also weird.
But it would also loop together the whole Dota-Sal-Danny-Ethan-Joe dynamic nicely.
Yeah, these kids kinda group together, don’t they? So when a new person becomes fully integrated in a new one, it links them up.
Right now, it’s at Joyce, Dorothy, Billie, Sarah, Walky, Mike, Becky, Dina as Group 1
Danny, Joe, Amber, Ethan, Jacob as a much more loose group 2.
And I guess Sal, Marcie, Carla, and Malaya are another group, it’s been a while since we’ve seen them.
And Ruth’s not really in any group yet, and neither is Roz. They only really interact with individual folks.
And as folks are making more friends, they’re starting to mix.
I remember getting my first “bad” grade. Your entire identity up to that point is based on being smart, then all of a sudden you have proof that maybe you aren’t. Hurts bad.
OH NO
On a completely random note day light saving is great, the comic now loads at 1600hrs whereas sometimes I have to wait until 1800hrs
I don’t get it 😀 (it is up looong before I get up on usual days, so for me it’s always “first thing after opening my eyes”)
WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOORRRRR???????!!!!!
Is that song lyrics, or a Mega Man X reference?
Clearly it’s both.
A GRADE WORTH FIGHTING FOOOOOORRRRRR
I feel like either she’s trying to be more approachable by failing at some stuff, or everything she’s trying to do is proving to be too much.
I don’t know which I would prefer.
Since her MO is never to fail, and she’s clearly depressed, I’d say the latter is definitely the case. And since it’s not her intentionally failing based on good intentions, but unintentionally failing on good intentions, it’s more heartbreaking.
Dorothy, the answer is clear. You need to get Joyce to tutor Walky! LOL.
That’s what I’m saying! Ggggrraaaaahhhh!!!
[throws monitor out the window]
It’s funny because with our grading style it looks like she got 100 out of 76.
1 out of 9L
That’d be one hell of an over achievement.
Same
Someone is going to have to explain the American marking system. In Canada 76/100= 76%, which according to our grades is a B. Anything lower than 72 (B-) is a C+ and 65 is a C, with 62 being a C- And so on and so forth into the 50’s as D’s.
Oftentimes, it’s ten-point cutoffs – 90-100 = A; 80-89 = B; 70-79 = C; 60-69 = D. (Pluses and minuses are then various cutoffs within those ranges.)
I understand the logic behind it, but that leaves so little room for error, which leads to a whole slew of other issues.
50 and up is generally a pass around here, which is fair enough I thought, since if you know as much or more than you don’t know.
And people around here wonder why kids are doing so poorly in school, or why they feel stressed to the point of depression or even suicide.
100-90 is A range, 89-80 B, 79-70 C, 69-60 D, 59 and below an F
Usually the top 3 and bottom 3 or 4 percentiles of each range result in a +/- qualifier on the grade.
Example: 89-87 is B+ but 86-84 is B and 83-80 is B-
Apparently this is roughly a C.
90s = A
80s = B
70s = C
60s = D
And anything below was a fail.
Around here, 80+ was an A, 70s were a B, 60s were a C, and the 50s were a D.
In college it’s 100% up to the individual professor, or at least the individual school.
Madness. Sheer madness.
Americans are fucking weird eh?
And (if you don’t mind me riffing off you), at least where I went to school, most grading went A, B, C+, C, C-, D (rare in my experience), F or Incomplete, so it wouldn’t necessarily even be seen as a low B if it was recorded by letter.
In actual reply- Maybe she’s a never gotten a B, or this is just enough to pull her total percent grade below where she wanted to be, and/or but probably and it may have shot her confidence.
Oh we’re doing numbers
In my Canadian schools:
A: 86+
B: 72-85
C: 55-72 iirc, I think C+ started at 66 or 67
D: 50-4
F: <50
I: Incomplete
But that disagrees with what it says about BC here so I guess my district was a bit different. In college I just went by percent.
http://www.classbase.com/Countries/canada/Grading-System
Ugh last one. Also, I think most people I saw with a grade under 60 (in middle and high school, not college) got offered an incomplete so they could redo or somehow catch up instead of failing and having it effect their average.
That’s what I remember too, A being 86+ and I went to school in BC. Then again it was nearly 20 years ago…
If college uses the same marking system as public schools, then Dorothy got a C or a C-. the A range is from 91.5 to a 100, Bs are 82.5 to 91.5, Cs 73.5-79.5, Ds 64.5 to 70.5, and anything lower is a failure. These are further broken into minuses, regulars and pluses, et cetera. Dorothy’s right on the edge of C- and C territory there
So everyone keeps telling me. Seems like more pressure for less gain.
Yeah, I think divvying letter grades up further into pluses and minuses is not beneficial. I’ve only dealt with them as a TA, not as a student, but blech. Like you say, added pressure for insignificant gains.
In my experience, before college, 90+ is an A, 80+ is a B, 75+ a C, and 70+ a D. In college, it varies from professor to professor but the “average” is the same as above except 70+ is C and 60+ is D. + and – don’t necessarily have set meanings and usually don’t affect GPA directly, but most commonly just means you’re right on the border: 100, 90, 89, 80, 79, 70, 69, 60.
For GPA, plus and minus are meaningful distinctions. On the 4-point scale (A=4, B=3, etc.), a plus is 1/3 above the letter grade and a minus is 1/3 below.
At least that’s how they worked at my college?
Wait wait wait. You’re telling me that the US education system is stricter than Canada about how much you can get wrong without failing, but somehow we still end up doing a crappy job of educating our kids in comparison? That’s…ok honestly that’s incredibly believable but serious. What the hell American public education system directly descended from the-…the Prussian public education model of the 1840s and 50s. Dammit that explains a lot.
Depends – sure, an 80 is generally an A here, but if it’s harder to GET an 80, it’s not really less strict.
If you look at the data, while our average is lower it’s far from the whole story – if you look at distributions they look pretty similar, right up until there’s an abnormally large section on the really low end for the U.S. Said section correlated really well with child poverty. It’s almost like not having enough to eat on a day to day basis makes it harder to do well in school or something.
When you’re used to getting A’s and you get a C, that’s devastating; especially for someone as career focused as Dorothy. There may be a long dry spell in Walky’s future. Oh well, there’s always chicken nuggets.
And a trampoline park.
Dorothy’s paper? So not transfer-bound, I guess.
At first I thought that test was Walky’s.
I dunno, this has been an even bigger kick to the balls than seeing Sir was, because having perfect grades is what marginally defines Dorothy, whereas Sir’s ever-looming presence in the background means that his arrival is stunning, but not entirely unexpected. In comparison, Dorothy, whether due to her craptons of new responsibility or simply having trouble with her work intensity, is wearing her down in an unexpected way that her disapperance should’ve implied, but the Ruth-Sir plot covered it all up for me, as well as her situation at large, but still corresponds to her losing control over her core principles, which breaks my heart.
tl;dr: DAAAAMN YOU WILLISSSSSS
Is it possible that Sir sabotaged Dorothy to make sure Ruth got to keep being the R.A? O_o
Eh, I think Dorothy’s lack of personability and being a freshman undermined her the most. Sir could manipulate a teacher into ruining her grades, likely through verbal or emotional pressure (as Sal conveyed in her slightly different, but successful, route to get better grades), but that seems too underhanded, even for him, and leaves too much of a paper/information trail to incriminate him. He probably just used his persuasive powers to make Ruth look better than Dorothy, which is believable, given how much he manipulated Chloe into keeping Ruth as RA despite the COUNTLESS warning signs. Still possible that he did more than that, though, even if seemingly unlikely.
She’s probably just finally overextended herself and is feeling the consequences of that.
This is actually pretty effective political commentary. You can’t be President if you have friends, Presidents don’t have friends. Roz was able to succeed in her political aims (sabotage Robin) because she was perfectly willing to use everyone around her as means to an end. Dorothy has a lot of work to do in that regard.
Dorothy could never be president anyway. Trump destroyed America.
Snigger
That’s our laugh. You can’t use that.
Snigger
Snigger
On the bright side, if the nuclear armageddon happens this year, then not only will the Cubs have won their first World Series in 108 years, but they’ll have managed to win the last World Series *ever.* Go Cubs!
Well, at least it wasn’t the Yankees.
I’m pretty sure Back to the Future II was actually just one year off. What did we get in 2016? Cubs won, self-tying shoes are a reality and Biff became president. Pretty much the main points of BTTF2 right there.
No. He just took us back to the good old corruption days of the 1870s to 1890s. Except with less Pinkertons and more nepo-*cough*incest*cough*-tism.
And coal factories, while by 2030, Scotland says they will force themselves to be 100% renewable energy
Hell, the Chinese government can now legitimately say that they are doing more to combat global warming than the US despite having toxic dump death cities because they are investing more money into renewable energy research and other green technologies than the US is (especially if Trump gets his budget aka the “Let’s make the most well funded military force in the world even more well funded, while we let poor and old people starve”). Almost makes a citizen want to buy into the tainted fruit of secession (we’ve actually got a secession movement here in California that’s hoping to get enough support to get a vote for a secession process on the ballot as a proposition in either 2018 or 2020).
Save us! N. Korea said personally they will nuke us this year, and Russia is selling nukes to terrorist on the black market! And terrorists have hidden laptop bombs that can get past security and Trump dismisses this and destroys environmental protection laws and builds coal factories. And N Korea might nuke LA first and they mightnmiss and hit me because I’m only a few hours away. God dammit, save me people! Take me to the Mars exploration team NASA, or at least let me hitch a ride to Switzerland. HELP US!!! Please, we beg of you.
Fun fact, if we doubled NASA’s underfunded budget, we could have self-sufficient colonial outposts working on terraforming it by 2050. Which we’ll need because at that point there will be 9.6 Billion people on earth unless nuclear Armageddon or a super plague bio-weapon hit us, which means fourth percent less resources for each person. And by resources I mean air, water, and food. Ha ha ha *sobbing breakdown* why didn’t we listen to you Carl Sagan and Niel deGrasse Tyson? Why?!?
If you actually think an extra few billion will get you self-sufficient colonies on Mars I’d be happy to sell you the land for ’em, literally dirt cheap.
Hey Neil deGrasse Tyson said in an interview (although this was back when NASA made up .4 percent of the federal budget, so I don’t know how old said interview was) that if we did double the budget we’d be able to send manned missions to Mars and soon. And he’s one of the top experts in the field of science that we have nowadays. I’m going to take his word for it.
Firstly…. What you’re quoting him as saying here is different than what you claimed in your previous post.
Secondly… He’s an astrophysicist, not a geologist, a demographer, a chemist, a botanist, or any other field where expertise would be necessary to be speaking on terraforming. If he did say what you claimed, it is/would be another situation like when he claimed bats are literally blind – speaking over-confidently outside his actual field of expertise.
Actually, Trump gave 3.4 billion to NASA, and we know that Mare has water and potatoes naturally can grow, and we’re sending three teams from 2020-2030 to begin excavating looking for water and life. We also recently created an almost perfect theory of how Mars formed:
Mars had oceans, life, like Earth had at one point. But then, after that, a chunk of a meteor fell onto Earth, while the rest hit Mars, causing the ancient tsunamis that formed Mars steep mountains, then the water either froze or ran off into deep caves formed by the tsunamis, and thus creating a rusty wasteland. We even have proof that the tsunamis started around the time the dino killing meteor hit Earth.
It was those damn Reapers, probably.
Or the Vogons disliked that Mars had water, which they run on hydraulic power, which allows them to destroy Earth for a hyperspace route. So they drained it
Your reply made me absurdly happy in my belly to see.
I need to replay ME.
So…the Promethean outpost on Mars was the last stand against the Reapers? And the Reapers saw early Cro-Magnon cavemen, but were feeling kind of lazy and decided “Ehh, they like just discovered fire, we’ll give them till the next cycle I mean, they’ve only gone from stone tools to slightly sharper stone tools over three cycles. Who knows maybe we found the one species of organic life that won’t invent AI they’ve been moving so slowly”? Also, if there are super advanced extraterrestrial ruins on Mars, people are going to be looking at Bioware very weirdly for a good long while.
Actually, NASA’s budget is about the same as previous years (though next year’s budget is going to be smaller), and the money for the Mars mission is coming out of their budge for climate research (because it’s not like that’s important at all, right?), plus cancelling further asteroid exploration missions, because that doesn’t sound as cool as going to Mars.
But Mars had LIFE!!! We need to know why only bacteria remains. Were the Martians advanced? Did they have agricultures? Why did they die out during the tsunamis? Were they killed by natural disasters or something else?
Watch it turn out Mars is the original birthplace of the human species and Earth was originally just a penal colony of criminals mind-wiped back to the Stone Age, and we end up discovering the ruins of our original precursor home. It would actually be really appropriate, given our propensity for war, if we are indeed the children of Mars and not Terra.
Are you suggesting we may be living on Space Australia?
@Delicious Taffy Exactly.
Bacteria is life, and the only life that we ever had an indication that mars had was bacteria (or more technically a bacteria analog). There’s nothing that suggests intelligent or even multicellular life.
Actually, were it not for severe waste in various industris, we could probably support a population of that size right now, and without as many of them starving as now.
I wonder what the weather is like in the TRAPPIST-1 system this time of year.
Regarding the alt-text: childish giggling accomplished
Uh oh. A 9L? That’s not even a real number!!
This is a job application. She qualified as a 001 (higher than 007) for the 9L job classification. (She could tell you what that is, but then she would have to–well, you know.) The red Xs mark her exceptional aptitudes.
Yeah. That makes sense. It’s not like she ever could get a C on a test or anything crazy like that.
What the fudgin fudge fudge!?!?
Nooo, Dorothy, don’t give up! Don’t panic, one bad grade isn’t the end of your ambitions, just learn from it and do better on the next one.
I hope tomorrow’s strip is Dorothy sitting where she it for 2 panels, and in the 3rd, Mike walks by and laughs at her.
Of course. Mike: the bane of humanity
And the last two panels are Sal driving up, slamming on her brakes to avoid hitting Dorothy’s feet, and yelling at her to get them out of the bike lane.
Sal has a motorcycle, can she ride on the bike lane?
You really think she cares?
Looks like it varies – the stuff I found yesterday said yes, the stuff I’m finding today says no. I imagine that, much like everything in the US, it varies by state or possibly just jurisdiction.
Sal rides her motorcycle on the sidewalk.
In her defence, that time was very much an emergency. Aside from that instance, I don’t believe we’ve seen her drive anywhere but the road (albeit, I can easily see her liking off roading but doing so on the frigging sidewalk isn’t really what most people think when they think off roading).
He does a Nelson laugh.
Like in Cheer Up Star?
‘Cause that would be great.
Looks like the dumb is sexually transmitted.
Soon we will see the onset of the next symptom — consumption of quiz.
Well, actually, there is a specified amount of smarts and intelligence to spread between IU, and Wally grew smarter talking to Dorothy, and therefore took her smarts like a parasite in order to keep the balance of the IU intelligence levels
… so the reason that Jason’s such a bad teacher is that he doesn’t have any smart to share?
He used to, but he has given it all away and has nothing left.
Don´t know why she is mad. I get a 50 in collage and I am happy as hell.
So far only 20
HOLY SHIT
HARVARD WON’T WANT YOU NOW, DOROTHY!!!
Wasn’t it Yale?
What, like Harvard has lower standards? Neither of them is gonna want her now, and neither will Stanford!
“So, Miss Keener-”
“Mis Keener, if you please.”
“All right, Mis Keener. We asked you to submit an application essay in which you describe overcoming adversity.”
“Yes.”
“You submitted a story in which you got a C on a quiz, highlighting the unexpected increase in difficulty in freshman year in college.”
“Yes.”
“You also took the opportunity to explain that you were balancing time with tutoring a failing student with a learning disability, breaking a major story at the school newspaper about a campus vigilante, protecting a friend from a rapist and trying to get him identified and arrested, and campaigning to step in to an unexpected vacancy as the floor RA, all while preparing yourself to be President one day.”
“Yes.”
“Leaving aside the… relative LACK of adversity in your life, I can’t read this as anything more than pure opportunistic spin for a bad grade.”
“But…-”
“That definitely shows Presidential potential!”
“… so I get in?”
“Well, no, your skills networking with the establishment are terrible. Not ONE PERSON in your family is an alum who has made a five-plus-figure-donation. You should really have networked with them better. When you get down to it, your ineptitude in cultivating rich, connected parents is FAR MORE important to getting into the Oval Office… and into Yale… than piddling grades or skill or potential.”
“….”
“Don’t look at me like that. We couldn’t have made it more obvious. You should have made better choices where your parentage was concerned.”
OW
OW
OW
IT HURTS BECAUSE IT’S TRUE
Walky doesn’t have a learning disability (as far as we know), but the rest of this has burning accuracy.
What a depressing, purely fictional description of a not-true political system. Glad we are not living in that world.
1. Dorothy: She could be upset merely at the bad grade, or she could be faced with an unaccustomed tradeoff, having just put time and effort into helping Walky and campaigning for Resident Advisor. She may be thinking about her moral standing in urging Walky to study. As other commentators point out, college is notorious for challenging students who previously did well at everything. She is self-aware enough to know that she has to be open with Walky about this, but telling Joyce may be harder. She certainly needs to study, as we saw in the run-up to Parents Weekend.
2. American grades: 76/100 might mean anything if the test was hard—the formula for a course can vary. I don’t know how things are now, but I certainly had exams in the 1970s on which 60% was a very high score because the instructor just guessed wrong about the difficulty of the problems. But I don’t think this matters for understanding today’s strip because the main point is that Dorothy’s score is nowhere near perfect, and she is not accustomed to that.
Wow. First Dorothy finds out Roz is preferred by most of her peers in a political candidate type situation, no she has her first “bad” grade? Poor girl’s self-esteem is going to be shattered, and of course she won’t tell Walky because she thinks Walky will be even more concerned about being a burden and ai ai ai she’s going to trap herself in a burn out cycle. So, one of three things is going to come of this. Outcome 1: Dorothy completely burns out in a complete breakdown as she tries to put even more effort into everything, while slowly withdrawing from friends and family until an intervention is required. Outcome 2: Dorothy gives up on transferring into an Ivy League school and realizes that her long term goals and dreams can still possibly be achieved without an Ivy League education. Outcome 3: Dorothy attempts to rebalance herself, probably by cutting down the hours on the volunteer work she does and utterly cutting out the extracurricular she finds least enjoyable or most time consuming (she’s doing two or three extracurricular’ aside from the volunteer work right?) while still hoping this grade was a one time thing and hoping she can still eventually transfer.
In the future please use spaces. (Big button on your keyboard that says ENTER)
But we don’t know what type of grading system is used so it’s hard to tell what she got, for me 76/100 is a B+, so I really don’t see what’s wrong.
According to the hover text, seems like a C.
There are plenty of spaces in what you replied to. Did you mean enter?
Ugh can’t edit. I meant, “did you mean ‘paragarph breaks’ instead of ‘spaces'”.
Sorry about the lack of paragraph break spaces. I’m…not very good with typing on a mobile device to say the least (I have very unwieldy thumbs).
The result is that I tend to not use the “return” button very often because it causes problems with typing, and generally adds a lot of time to what I am attempting to type. I will do my best to keep it in mind for the future. Thank you.
This is an interest narrative pivot that I wasn’t expecting, really cool. I was never great, academically, so this world of overachievers and the expectations and pressure on them is really alien to me, but I’m really interested to see where this goes. I really felt the impact of this. She is really shocked. I’m guessing she never had a C in her entire life? I can only imagine what that must be like. Poor Dotty =/
The first C (or really any grade significantly lower than what you’re used to) is hard. It’s really damn hard. The worst is when they start snowballing (the first one makes you feel like shit, so you avoid school work to avoid facing what happened, so you lose time that you should have spent studying and your grade suffers further, and so on and so forth) and you basically never get caught up.
Maybe that was just me, but the first “bad” grade after a lifetime of academic success is rough no matter if it is a one-off or the start of a new trend.
Maybe that’s Walky’s paper?
That’s what I thought. “She has the Walkerton file!”
Grading system we used.
0 – 16 = F
16 – 32 = E
32 – 48 = D
48 – 64 = C
64 – 80 = B
80 – 100 = A
So what’s the problem?
Someone (Meaning Willis) really need to clarify what grading system is used.
It’s the system used at IU. Which means it’s a C unless the prof. curves in which case it’s probably a high C.
At least in the US, a C being roughly 70-79 is the most common, both in high school and college. In college especially many professors grade on a curve or use idiosyncratic systems of their own, but given that there’s no punch line about it actually being an A due to the curve or some such and given that Dorothy’s reaction seems to fit nicely to it being a “C” and even more given the alt-text suggestion that a 66 would have been the “D”, I think it’s already pretty damn clear what’s meant.
Not the thread’s descent into comparison of various grading schemes hasn’t been fun.
The grading system that’s most commonly used (in the US, at least) is
90-100: A
80-89: B
70-79: C
60-69: D
<60: F
The fabled E grade. Whoa.
*too awed to reply*
I’VE ALWAYS WONDERED
I want that grading system!!
I wonder what class this was in.
Judging from the random scattering of scribbles, I’d say this was math.
Man, I remember my first C, in H.S. pre-calculus, I spaced out in class, got a D on the final and never took a math course again.
Jeez, I’m wishing I went to school where some of y’all went. Here was our absolute shitty grading system that’s starting to make me think maybe I wasn’t doing so well because the standards were absuuuurdly high (and no wonder my state was considered one of the worst in education):
A: 92-100
B: 85-91
C: 77-84
D: 70-76
F: 0-69
So yeah basically when I first glanced at it, based on my own experiences in school, I understood why Dorothy was so dang upset.
Holy shit! An 84 is a C?!? Which state did you grow up in?!?!?
THIS is the grade scale I remember.
I went to school in Georgia (United States).
I’m a Tennessee boy, and those grade breakpoints look VERY familiar.
Over here in Norfolk, my elementary school used the eight-point scale (what Amber detailed) until after I moved on to middle and high school, at which point they switched to the ten-point scale.
South Carolina, so very close to Rectilinear Propagation. Unfortunately, I didn’t get out of there until well after high school, so… yeah. It was really stressful, especially with my depression.
Note that it really doesn’t matter. The grading scale is largely irrelevant. Your “C” at 80 might well be equivalent to some other school’s “C” at 76. It’s not like you’re all taking the same tests, getting the same numerical grades and then having them interpreted differently.
As my Physics professor who graded on a strong curve put it: “I design the test. I can put the average for the class basically anywhere I want.” He liked to put it around 50, so that there was more room for the better students to differentiate themselves. In that class, a 50 on a test tended to be around a B-. That didn’t make the class easy.
It also has to do with how hard the questions are. It doesn’t matter if one school says an 80 is a D and another says it’s an A if the second school makes GETTING an 80 super hard.
Was your school full of kids with depressive disorders? Because this looks way too stressful for anyone’s well being.
OK, seeing all the discussion of the score prompts me to jump in. I am a university mathematics professor (like DoA’s Professor Rees except, you know, in real life) and have been for about 25 years. On the scale I have used since time immemorial, a 76 is a C. And as in the alt text, a 66 is a D. F is 0-59. So yeah, if Willis’ intention is that Dorothy got a C, this pretty much matches the way I do things.
I had this exact same moment in college
the “I’m having gpa-induced crisis so I’m going to sit quietly on the ground and look at some trees” moment
It’s an important part of the scientific and/or creative process.
In the UK at university
40% = pass
50% = 2:2
60% = 2:1
70% = 1
My first thought was that she was surprising Walky somewhere because he had unexpectedly done really well; then that she was taking a quiet moment to herself to relax and avoid burnout…
Comments sections can be really useful sometimes!!
I’m American so sorry for not understanding, but what does 2:2, 2:1, and 1 mean? Is that related to ABC grades or is that different?
We don’t have ABC grades at university, copied from wiki because I’m lazy and it’s nicely detailed:
First-class honours (1st, 1 or I) – typically 70% or higher
Second-class honours, upper division (2:1, 2i or II-1) – typically 60–69%
Second-class honours, lower division (2:2, 2ii or II-2) – typically 50–59%
Third-class honours (3rd, 3 or III) – typically 40–49%
At universities like mine (I went to Loughborough, the ough being pronounced differently IN THE SAME WORD is a wonderful example of how English is stupid) the percentage is worked out as an average of your grades for each year excluding the first year – so if you fudge up in first year as long as you didn’t get less than 40% (and thus fail the year) it’s still possible to get a first at the end.
Under 40% is usually considered a fail, though if you managed to not fail the first two years you can be awarded a “diploma of higher education” as a sort of “thanks for trying, enjoy all that debt with no real benefit!”
Apparently you can also get a “certificate of higher education” if you passed the first year and then failed the second, but I doubt many people would show up for graduation to receive one of those.
Maybe Dorothy could be cheered by the news that Power Rangers is just as good on a second watch.
I’m assuming that it went okay for you. Is it getting better for you again?
The night went pretty well. My brother was against seeing the movie the moment it was announced, but tonight he left the cinema telling us not to tell his coworkers that he not only watched it, but liked it. I also got to rename all of my girlfriend’s Pokemon in Pokemon GO and sit in on her jazz choir class, so that was pretty fun as well.
Days have been getting better, even if I’m still not sure things in general are. It’s a good sign, and I’m almost in a good enough place to dare to be optimistic.
Good. Still, though, don’t be too sudden to act. Let everything calm down slowly, and I think your relationships will be fine. I’m happy for you right now 🙂
Well, that definitely cheering me up. I’ve been…afraid to go see the new movie. Mainly because Michael Bay has made me very wary of Hollywood making movies about shows from the 80s and 90s that I loved.
Today’s the last day it’s showing, at least in my area. You might still have time for a running-to-do-the-thing montage.
Pretty decent score, Dorths
“Pretty decent” won’t get her into Stanford, though :[
But will it get her to Yale?
(I know, I know, pedantic joke)
I knew something didn’t sound right, but my brain was all “wait, is it Stanford or Stamford?” GJ, brain. Totally caught that one
Well, if it helps, it IS totally called Stanford.
Now Walky and Dorothy can do the dance of avoidance.
“How’s your tutoring going?”
“Amazingly well, how come I haven’t seen you in class recently?”
“I’m actually uh… teaching a different class. Can I see one of your tests?”
“Oh I would, but I actually gave them all up to be recycled. I care so much about the environment that keeping stray paper around makes me break out in hives…”
Repeat until both are dead.
I’m just imagining them coming near each other and never actually touching, just spinning around and around, like two magnets with the same pole facing each other.
I friggin’ LOVE Doroty, and this shoe has been waiting a long time to drop.
All those extra curricular things she has done has caught up with her. In particular, it’s the second shoe to going swimming with Joyce after the assault, to drinking rocket fuel with Billie in the murder cave after Ruth was taken away and tutoring Walky after he came clean about his math problems. There were hints about Dorothy neglecting her own studies and her friends worrying for her.
And the thing is – those were all the RIGHT decision. Dorothy grew as a human, as a self-identified “Team mom” and helped the people around her.
But still she was not rewarded for it. Maybe she would have been better off not answering when a cute caramel boy threw a monkey at her.
But it’s not only Friends Vs Career (TM). It’s also her biting on more than she could chew in her career plans. Perfect grades AND star journalist AND soup kitchen Volunteer AND RA… was too much.
This is a very poignant moment for me. More so BECAUSE it’s so subdued. This is not an identity crisis as for Walky or a life-and-death situation as for Ruth and Billie. But it is something very important to her that did not work out as she wanted. Not because she did anything wrong but because she did everything right.
This is Dorothy growing up, and I love her dearly.
Visually, this is my second most favorite comic (the top one is the “original sin” one with Joyce and Becky). We zoom in on a Dorothy sitting all alone, who has just stopped. Just as we take a moment to understand what’s going on, she has taken a moment to process. We understand something is wrong, but it’s not until we zoom in to the paper and see her clenched hand we understand the magnitude of the situation.
This is so true.
Dorothy is finally getting her growing-up arc, and that’s good for her. However, how will that affect her relationship with Walky? She doesn’t seem to have had a problem with her grades before, therefore meaning that she won’t know how to deal with the situation in the way that she should. This might lead to a lot of drama and possibly another temporary end to their relationship as Dorothy claims she needs space to catch up with her grades, leaving Walky with a lack in his support system.
Honestly, that would be the worst decision for her to make, because with both of them struggling, they could support each other and strengthen their relationship instead of fraying it.
Unfortunately, the Willis will most likely demand the “drama” timeline. I would be more surprised if there weren’t a whole lot of things messed up by Dorothy’s panicky decisions in regards to bettering her grades.
[I’m sorry, I talk too much.]
I legit gasped.
As an A-B student with learning disabilities and extracurricular activities, I can confirm that that first bad grade hits hard. But she can work through this. Anyone can. <3
That is very true – and we know that Dorothy can do it. But it still hits hard – especially in the aftermath of everything else that has been going on lately.
I mean, this is the day after she said this:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/02-everything-youve-ever-wanted/limitations/
Wait, how is DANNY currently running away with that future-strip poll? I mean, the “Unknown Evil” part maybe adds some mystery, but either Joe or Danny should be more than enough to cancel that out. More likely, those of us Carla fans are splitting the vote. Can we really let Danny win over the clearly more qualified candidate, Carla? Fair vote now!
I love Carla, but I love finding out who mysterious ‘unknown evil’ is more.
I can only assume that the thought of Carla from the future was just too intense for people to handle
Ok, it’s a fair point that Future Carla might be a bit too much awesome for some. Still, mostly I was trying to point out that once again some buffoonish guy is abusing the system to beat a far more qualified candidate. So, maybe we can banish the Electoral College and Danny at the same time? I’m with Carla.
Qualified? The only qualification is that people want to see the strip. The unknown evil made people curious. And people like Danny too. He’s got a lot of good points.
I can think of three reasons.
Reason 1: Danny’s grown a lot as a character and a decent amount of us do like him now…though Carla is by far ten times better than him.
Reason 2: Given that Joe’s involved this could involve Danny deciding to excise Joe from his life, which would be quite interesting.
Reason 3: People are very, very intrigued by what the “unknown evil” could be in this situation. We want to know how Willis is going to throw us a curveball that takes us for a spin.
I’m still personally voting for the one with Carla and Joyce, because I’m hoping it could very well be Joyce finding out what being transgender is.
If I’m being honest, though I do love Carla, I like Danny just a little bit more, simply because it’s easier for me to relate to him.
I like both Danny and Carla, so unknown evil tipped the scale.
What if the unknown evil isn’t a person, but something like Joe deciding to try to get Danny with Ethan without listening to all of the reasons from Danny why that would be a VERY BAD IDEA.
Because Joe doesn’t listen.
Oh wow looks like Dorothy and Walky are going to have a shared crisis here <3
The thing is, Dorothy is having this crisis in part BECAUSE of Walky’s—because she pushed herself too hard. It’s her fatal flaw.
I was Dorothy-ish about grades in high school.
That may be a C, but it feels like an F.
I was even harder on myself for a while. I got so stupidly attached to my 4.0 that any B felt like a failure…even though all my parents ever asked for was for me to do my best. When your best is usually straight A’s, the second you get a B, you spend way too much time thinking about “could I have done anything else?” “What if I studied instead of hanging out with friends that one Saturday?” “What if I studied instead of slept?”
So, is Dorothy having problems of her own? Is Yale suddenly looking like a distant prospect to her?
A 76 is a good score. Depending on where the class average sits, it’s roughly a B, right at the cutoff. And if she’s done mostly A work to this point, it’s especially no big deal.
But it’s impossible, I find, to convince students of this. Figure out what you missed and why, use your errors as an opportunity to deepen your understanding, and apply that moving forward. No matter how good or poor a student you are, each exam is a chance to grow, and it should be taken. A 76 isn’t a problem unless you dwell on it and beat yourself up over and don’t actually take away the educational value of it.
It’s strongly implied to be a C. It’s that way in the most common US systems and basically stated to be in the alt-text.
All things are possible, but I also strongly suspect this isn’t going to be a storyline about Dorothy working herself up about nothing important, but about her having seriously overstretched herself.
I think this is just the kick in the pants Dorothy needs to realize she needs to focus on the most important thing she needs to be in order to become President: a millionaire. You can get into the Presidency with a C average (look at George W. Bush) but you’re not going to be President unless you’re incredibly rich AND have rich friends. Dorothy needs to work on that.
I agree. Not to knock Dorothy’s ambitions, but her career path doesn’t really point where she claims to want to go. Perfect grades and an undergraduate Ivy degree are neither necessary nor sufficient to be president.
Working towards an Ivy League grad school – probably in Law, would be a more reasonable plan. I’d also hope to see some interest in being a politician – rather than just President. Does she want a legislative office or to work up from mayor or governor?
I believe her plan was to go to Yale for law or political science (and then springboard into law) and network into more political shit from there.
I don’t think we’ve seen much more than “I’m going to transfer to Yale and become President”, but I could have forgotten something.
As I understand it, transferring to Yale as an undergrad is harder than getting in in the first place. Applying to Yale Law for grad school OTOH is still exclusive, but much more possible.
Dorothy has talked about Yale then President but she was completely blindsided by the networking thing. I think because it never occurred to her that nobody but a handful of people liked her. Part of the reason why Roz was so devastating was that if she can’t win over a dorm, she can’t win over anyone.
In the future, given all the confusion, I think Willis would do well to actually put the letter grade on there with the numbers. That’s a legitimate way a teacher might put in a grade, and people at least understand that a C is a bad grade for a A student.
I’m thinking that even if the teacher curves it up to an A, Dorothy’s still gonna hate the fact she missed so many points.
I thought Amber and Danny were the C students, they’re the ones in the IT class.
At the rate they’re going, they won’t be getting to C for another decade.
Their time, not ours.
[slow clap]
Hopefully this is the event that makes Dorothy realize what an Albatross Walky has been for her and she dumps his useless butt.
so im not american is a 76 bad?
76 is decent. Good for those that don’t really care and are fine with barely pacing. Bad for overachievers and the like.
Most assignments in the states are based on a 100-point scale. Every ten points, you drop a letter grade, from A through D. Past a D, you recieve an F, a failing grade (usually starting below 60 percent of all answers correct). For a lot of honor/top-of-the-class students, a 76 when you’re used to mid-upper 90s for upwards of 10 years running can be traumatic.
When you’re Dorothy, and you’re a woman seeking the highest office in the land, you have to be flawless in personality and actions, or a career woman with a service and history that puts most of her male colleagues to shame will lose to a blatant racist and unapologetic racist and everything you thought was good about your country turns to ash in your mouth because your countrymen were too stupid or corrupt to see the single-biggest threat to the Union in probably 150 years for what it is.
Sorry, am I projecting?
No, that sounds about right.
Women have to try so much harder in
today’ssociety for no other reason than, as a culture, there is the social stigma still lingering, whether people want to admit it or not, that women aren’t as ‘strong’ or as ‘powerful’ as men are. We have to work our asses off to prove that we’re smart, confident, strong, and resourceful people with more potential than just staying at home with the kids, cleaning house and paying bills and being pretty.I think I’m projecting now, too.
That was supposed to say unapologetic sexual predator, not a second racist.
It’s alright, we got what you were trying to say.
Okay, but can we talk about how–even from a purely structural perspective–this strip is amazing? Like, you have the first three panels crowded with either four people in a tight frame or a bunch of word balloons. And then the sudden silence and stillness of Dorothy, which almost looks peaceful until you close in on her death grip on the paper? And suddenly her being turned away is no longer up for interpretation, and the fact that you know the expression on her face without seeing it is heartbreaking.
Like, fuck, Willis. Well-paced and superbly rendered, my man.
Everyone draw what they think is Dorothy’s face right now.
Everyone seems to be struggling in this class and I’m beginning to think that the teacher for this class is not very good. There are some good reasons for each student’s individual struggle (Dorothy has a lot on her plate, for example), but a lot of people are having trouble with this class.
They collect the students notes at the end of the class, i.e. defeating the purpose of notes. This teacher is awful.
Could be. But they are just a few weeks into the semester so it could simply be the difference of grading systems kicking in, or the kind of knowledge needed to pass. Idk how it’s like in the US, but over here (in Europe) in school much is done to support students not to fail, individualisation as a key, if it’s possible (class size, learning abilities etc.), and in university it’s “Learn this or you’ll be left behind.” There’s much more stuff to learn than in school, and you have to arrange your courses yourself and get used to kicking yourself in the ass. I’d say about 1/4th of the students aren’t used to that, at least not to this extent, and not to the amount of new things they have to learn. My first semester comprised in theories and new information nearly what I had to know at the end of high school.
Though until proven wrong, your suggestion can be true too. Although I can’t remember whom we’ve seen failing in this specific course (I mean, I forgot who else is in this course and overall there’d have to be at least 20+ students more in the lecture, of whom we know absolutely nothing).
Dorothy doesn’t take the Math class.
Well, for the Math class, we know the TAs are horrible and they think the professor is bad, so that says something.
That said, as Nono said, Dorothy isn’t in the same Math class and we don’t actually know what class this grade is for.
Thanks for the reminder that they are in different classes. I thought they were in the same class because Walky threw something at Dorothy in a mutual class once, but that must have been in a different class.
My personal transition to college wasn’t that rough, but that probably depends on the school and the department. In the USA college teachers don’t need the same training in how to teach that high school teachers need so there can be very wide variation in college teacher quality, including some very bad ones who are only at the university because they are publishing in their field (or in some cases, because their spouse was big in their field) and not because they are any good at teaching.
Oh, I see. Didn’t read the alt-text at first. Over here in the UK that’s a high pass.
Lucky bastards.
I think this will do Dorothy more good than harm, overall, because (unlike Walky) she’s mature enough to deal with it wisely.
After a long string of successes, Dorothy has finally come face to face with failure. It was going to happen eventually; better it should happen now, in her freshman year, than on her first job, or her first run for public office, or in her marriage. She has more time and space to learn from it, now, and as long as she deals with it maturely, the consequences are not very grave.
And it will help her to understand Walky, and empathize with what he went through when he first encountered failure, in his math course.
Remember Lincoln, Dorothy!
She’s a humanities major. Once she’s out of here, she gets to talk about calculus like it’s some sort of unknowable eldritch chant, rather than something fundamental to every natural science and a punchline in pure math.
Yeah but… You know, getting a physical reminder that she isn’t Practically Perfect in Every Way might be a bit of a blow to the ol’ self-esteem.
We don’t even know what subject this is for. Nothing says Calculus. For all we know, that’s a law quiz.
We don’t know whether this is a math grade. It may well be history or econ or an actually-her-major poli-sci C-grade.
Regardless of what the subject is, if the C continues it will screw up her GPA enough to make transferring to Yale a practical impossibility rather than simply a tough proposition.
Oh, nvm, she’s pre-law like Sarah.
In that case, I’m hoping it’s a pre-law course. We might be able to get some Sarah and Dorothy studying time as Sarah’s already passed the course that Dorothy’s struggling with.
Is she? I didn’t remember seeing that. (Not that pre-law is technically a major as we learned this week.)
I was actually kind of assuming she was poli-sci, since it would fit nicely with what I see as her very naive approach to wanting to be president. Aiming for a Law Degree actually fits the path far better.
She is in poli sci, but she seems to want to use that to springboard into law school.
She’s political science, as per the strips with her talking to Robin.
That said, she’s in a law class, as per Patreon canon. It could be that.
I wonder if right now the words; “I’m sorry if I thought love was more important than stupid Yale!” are playing through her head?
Nah…
this is giving me actual anxiety
I Know That Feel
There are places in America where a 66 is a D?!?! In Georgia (state, not country) that’s a failing grade. A 76 is a C or a D, I’m having trouble finding the scale for letter grades (also, they changed the scale for points).
The “traditional” scale is 90-100 A, 80-89 B, 70-79 C, 60-69 D, 0-59 F. Some places do consider a D to be a failing grade though.
For me we didn’t have a D grade until college where its a weird not-failing-but-often-might-as-well-be situation.
Yeah, I had several classes in college that required C or better to graduate in that major and/or that specific classes.
I was never a terrific student and was always used to getting a number of C’s over the course of the school year, but then my freshman year of college I got my act together and got straight A’s for the first time. That changed again as the courses got harder, but it was amusing and cathartic to see all the lifelong straight-A students flip out about getting their first C’s while my experience was the exact opposite.
how could this happen to me
OOOOHHHHHHHH SHIIIIIIIIIITTTTTT
DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUUUN
I CON-CUUUUUUUUUUUUUR!
I don’t think it really matters whether the grade is a c, d or even a b in Dorothy’s mind. She gets As. She bases her selfworth, her future happiness, on her intelligence and her work ethic. If she’s getting other grades, she didn’t work hard enough (this was my family’s mode of thinking, reaponsible for a lot of bullshit for my sibling and I), because she’s obviously intelligent. Dorothy works so hard already. How much and what quality of sleep is she getting? A person only contains so much energy and Dorothy is terrified of letting things slip. If this isn’t her break point, it’s coming. When it does, it will hit her hard.
As the hover text for Walky telling Dorothy about his failing grades put it:
“Did – did you get a B?”
“I think lower than that.”
“GRADES GO LOWER?”
So, yeah, doesn’t matter if that’s a D, C, or B in this school (though survey says most likely a C). Dorothy most likely considers it as good as an F. Perfectionism isn’t fun.
People are going on and on about the grading system.
I bet if the number was 80 Dorothy’d have the exact same result.
That’s how perfectionism works.
I too remember honestly believing I could outrun/outwork failure for my entire life. That was slapped out of me by a teacher who hated my everything, but the lesson is the same. Incoming First Time Experience for Dorothy. I guess this is what College is for.
I seriously doubt anyone thinks she would have been happy with a low B. At least not anyone who’s current on the series.
It’s quite obvious she’s gonna let Walky go to continue studying u_u
Yeah. I said something about this earlier, but not being in this situation before will most likely leave Dota making some poor decisions in an attempt to salvage her good grades.
What she won’t realize is that support to and from Walky will be the best thing for her now.
These comments are wild to read as someone who went to a UK university. I gave my US friend a pep talk just the other day about how 60 is not a bad score over here and he should feel better. 60 means a 2:1, which is pretty much the university equivalent of a B. An extremely respectable grade.
My undergrad average was 72% and I still came 22nd in my year.
Even comparing it to a B is a bit iffy. The lowest and highest marks are just ridiculously hard to get that going from a 72 to a 78 probably means you gave the marker a new idea for the subject that they’re going to steal from you and develop themselves. Whereas going below 30 takes some effort, like drawing the teacher being eaten by a dinosaur on your paper effort.
On another note: Awwwww! I like that Walky was so confident Dorothy would get the RA gig. So cute!
Be honest, Willis.
After you typed that alt-text, you STILL were giggling like a child.
Hell, probably before he typed it.
As soon as he thought of it.
I have to say, with Dorothy’s confidence, this grade could lead to a storyline about thoughts of suicide. Or worse, an attempt. She might see the future as totally destroyed. Willis, please protect my girl Dorothy. Give her some perspective. Don’t put her on the ledge.
Sad Dorothy is sad 🙁
There is only one thing to do – SWEET, SWEET, UPSIDE-DOWN-JOYCE-TIME! NOW!!!
Dorothy is not perfect any longer! Mission achieved.
She never was perfect.
I think that’s just hitting her upside the face now.
She was always perfect in her imperfection 🙂
This is kind of heartbreaking.
Her body language and not seeing her face sells it really well. :___(
Wait
SO IN AN AGLOPHONE COUNTRY YOU CAN HAVE MORE THAN HALF OF THE EXAM RIGHT AND STILL NOT PASS?
She passed, it’s just a really bad grade by her standards.
Walky is afraid of what his mom will do if he doesn’t get A.
Dorothy is her own mom. She is TWO moms. That is double disappointment.
Yep. Even if you have a basic understanding of the material, you will still be considered a “failure” by your teachers because you didn’t hit a certain number on a standardized test.
My Fishers, Indiana, USA, high school’s grading scale is on page 3 of this document:
http://www.hse.k12.in.us/resources/pdf/FHS/academics/courses/course_guide_explanations_-_1-23-15.pdf
If you get less than 60%, you fail. And if you get below an 80% (at least if you’re in almost all honors/AP/ACP/IB classes like I was) you feel shame.
My first thought: Hmm. Some of those questions were weighted differently than others.
My second thought: Oh look. Dorothy is sad.
INTP here.
Ah yes, the moment in college when you realize that you never learned how to learn in highschool.
Hey so is that Slipshine real? Asking for a friend…. <.<
Best possible avatar 😛
Found the answer myself. 🙂
Real as in it exists? Yes.
As in canon? No, not to this universe anyway.
You have a great avatar!
Well what I think Willis is going for is that, whatever grading scale is being used, that’s a low score for Dorothy.
She’s smart and motivated, but we’ve been worried for some time that she’s spreading herself too thin. She’s trying for straight As, she’s tutoring Walky, she’s an intrepid reporter, and she’s trying to become the RA.
It’s too much. And now it’s showing. She needs to slow down and focus on Dorothy first.
I’m sorry, I just noticed NSFW banner on the side that appears to be Joyce and Dorothy kissing…
What is this. How. I don’t…
I’ve been both “oh no, I only got a 93” and “I’d kill for a 76” at different times so I’m conflicted about this.
See Dorothy and Walky have more in common than their terrible taste in cartoons!
Ah yes, the classic “good enough” score. I’ve had…well okay perhaps all of them were “good enough” scores, in my life.
IDK What your grading system was but for me 75+ was a D in my schools.
So I may not be full grasping things here.
0-59=F 60-69=D 70-79=C 80-89=B 90-100=A
Damn, what does it say that In a lot of my classes, especially math (ordinary differential equations right now) a 76/100 would be pretty good, most likely an A?