Few things frustrate students more than an A-minus tainting their transcript — a grade just shy of academic excellence — reinforcing doubts about their adequacy and purporting mastery while simultaneously undermining it. Though ostensibly a mark of strong performance, the A-minus is instead a slap in the face to most students. This grading system punishes students for slight imperfections, affirming a culture of hyper-perfectionism at the expense of sustained learning and growth.
An A-minus drastically lowers a student’s GPA, despite it supposedly being representative of high academic achievement, diminishing their hard work. Generally, a 94%, or an A-letter grade, earns students a 4.0, while an A-minus, or a 93%, is calculated as a 3.7. The difference between these two grades could be a simple matter of a few points docked on an exam, but it has significant implications for students’ futures. For example, a lower GPA could limit opportunities for scholarships, graduate school admission, and even job prospects by casting doubt on a student’s academic capability and discipline. While the A-minus disproportionately penalizes students, in contrast, an A-plus does nothing to reward a student for exceeding expectations.
The outsized impact an A-minus has on a student’s GPA reveals systemic flaws in our education system. The A-minus is an inconsistent, despotic metric that fosters point haggling and perfectionism. Letter-based grading prioritizes maximizing points over intellectual growth, teaching students to hyperfixate on arbitrary imperfections instead of true mastery of course material. Although the issue of this grading system extends beyond the A-minus, it stands as one of the most glaring examples of how our education system prioritizes menial distinctions over genuine learning. Higher education is meant to foster critical thinking, promote intellectual growth, and prepare students to meaningfully contribute to the workforce and their communities.
The A-minus, and the plus-minus grading system generally, reinforces an obsession with extracting every point possible in order to demonstrate excellence, thus negating the objective of higher education. A student who earns a 90% has demonstrated academic excellence and should be awarded for their hard work, rather than penalized on a subjective scale. If the plus-minus grading scale’s purpose is to create a hierarchy of student capabilities, why are A-plus students not rewarded for their apparent excellence?
The A-minus becomes even more nonsensical when considering how irrelevant it is in the real world. Employers and colleagues do not quantify someone’s expertise by whether they mastered 90% or 94% of a concept; rather, they evaluate one’s ability to apply acquired knowledge effectively. Yet, universities cling to this futile distinction, as if the A-minus meaningfully distinguishes the capabilities of high-achieving students.
The A-minus reinforces a narrow definition of success, where the pursuit of perfection obscures the value of learning, curiosity, and intellectual growth. This system not only undermines the objective of higher education, but it has no real-world application and is unnecessarily burdensome and stressful for students. If the true goal of educational institutions is intellectual growth, it may be time to reconsider, or abolish, this antiquated metric of student achievement.
