Forum - View topicAnime in show test scores?
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Darksorrow29
Posts: 412 Location: United States |
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Wasn't too sure how to best title this. A lot of times in anime sometimes you still characters getting test scores in high school of like '10, 15, 30' etc. It always made me wonder is that out of 100? Like at least for me growing up in the United States you always have the perception that on average you want to score at least above 80% correct on your exam. So out of 100 points, an 80 is 'okay' and below 70 or 65 is failing. So to me like a '10,15, 30' is an absurdly low test score.
So recently I was watching One Week Friends. Main character took a retest on an exam and scored like a 30 or something and mentioned how he barely passed? However the female classmate scored 100 on the exam the first time? Minami-ke is another show that comes to example. One of the main characters may score like a 20 however her friend scores a 90+. Is anyone here familiar with how test scores work at all in Japanese schools? I'm not looking for realism in anime or anything, I just wasn't sure if these were just highly exaggerated moments of failure or what's going on. Thanks |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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At least once I've heard a teacher character giving a cutoff grade when passing back the exam, suggesting that there's no universal pass/fail cutoff like we're used to.
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Vaisaga
 Posts: 13224 |
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Wow, that's terrible. Anything over a 50 is good, don't let anyone tell you otherwise! In One Week Friend's case, I'm pretty sure the teacher threatened more work for those who did worse on their make-up exam, so Hase saying he barely passed probably refers to how he barely did better than last time. |
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Bango
 Posts: 1122 |
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One teacher where I live graded her students rank-compared to the other students and got away with it for half a year. How it basically worked is that in a class of say 30 students only one person could get a 100% (30/30). Even if 2 students answered every question correctly whichever one she got to first would get 100%. The next would get 99%. The fail line was whatever the minimal permissible number was for her job to not fall under suspicion.
It was bullcrap. I highly doubt that's what's going on here but I'm very sure that Japan does use comparative marking for some things. |
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hyojodoji
Posts: 584 |
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As to 'failing marks' at real-life schools in Japan, it depends. At School A, it is 'under the average mark'. At School B, it is 'under the half of the average mark'. At School C, 40 (out of 100). At School D, 60, and so on. Since Japanese people did tsukkomi to the character's having scored 32 on the retest and passed it, the high school in the anime in question may be a very low-ranking school, though. ｗ https://twitter.com/masaomi_drrr/status/465914723469242368 https://twitter.com/BlueLegend0807/status/465512504504750080 https://twitter.com/tamo_2012/status/465512674709626880 |
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Dessa
 Posts: 4438 |
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It's called a Bell Curve. In a traditional Bell Curve, the lowest score is automatically failing, as well, regardless of if they would have passed on a normal scale. One of my teachers in high school used it (but not with the auto-failing score). It has its uses. |
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
 Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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When I was growing up, a lot of teachers used the curve, but a very solid majority used standard scores. I never liked the curve, though I did understand why it was used. I just rejected the rationale: what *should* matter is how well I am absorbing/understanding the material, not how well I do it compared to other students. I suspect grading on a curve has greatly fallen out of favor over the years, though, as there will always be those who get poor grades as a result of using that method. Not good for the egos of students. |
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3652 |
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From a teacher's perspective, writing a test with the target of having X% be representative of "understanding the material" is pretty much impossible, especially when just getting started and you don't have a giant sample size of past students to measure what they can do.
In some fields, curves push grades up, not down, relative to the traditional standard scale, because no one should be wasting their time in a class where they can get 90% on tests. |
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Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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I do not think that it is good to know only half of what you should have learned. However, for test scores it is really hard to generalize what is good because there are too many variables in terms of the tests and the teachers.
That explains why some schools are ranked higher than others and are harder to get into and have a higher percentage of graduates who get into college. I had been curious about that. And it explains why the girls in K-On! wonder how Yui got into their school. 
Thank you, hyojodoji, for another very informative post. |
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hyojodoji
Posts: 584 |
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It's a pleasure. Novelist Kita Morio has written a few books about his boyhood, and, according to one of them, the fail mark at the higher school which he attended was 59 (out of 100). Higher schools were exclusive élite schools in the ancien régime, and they are different from modern-day high schools. |
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