I wish those A's I got from studios had mattered in real world... then I would have been driving several Lamborghini and building buildings with my own money on piles of gold.
Grades mean those stuff in a trash can over there... unless you become a professional student.

grading in school architecture studio is ridiculous. people flip out over anything under an A-. i wish more schools would institute pass/fail grading. a B+ is still a good grade.

Grades in studios do not mean anything after graduation. The "B" only indicates where you fell within the grading matrix of the professor who is obligated to give a grade in the first place.

Remember you can work your ass off the entire semester/quarter and come in with a lower grade because of your concept/analysis/design etc. and somebody else can never be in studio, barely work but yet came back with a really strong concept/diagrams to support the design etc. He will get an A and you will get a B. On the end only design counts and if a prof feels really bad for you he could bump you up but it will always be lower than the student with good ideas that are supported by a good design.

And NO grades do not help you in the real world. Nobody asks you what grades you've received etc. Now getting an A shows that you can design and be creating and THAT will help you in the real world where a student that was getting B's will be behind.

only important if you want to continue with academia later on.

same with awards. unless you want to work for oma or sanaa etc. they seem to prefer to hire award winning students for some reason. usually that requires good grades...


otherwise grades don't matter.

I will postulate that perhaps grades mean more than that... if you react to them in a meaningful way. If you got a B, work harder until you get A's. Then that B will have meant something, because it will have motivated you. But yeah, if you just want to sit here and bitch about how you got a B, then it didn't mean anything.

ask your prof why you got that grade if it bothers you ....
grading depends on the school and prof...so try not to get too cut up about it.....some profs just care if you are filling in the checks for what they believe is a successful project...while others want you to think on your own and re-phrase the question they asked in the first place....but always question everything...even your stupid grades.......

the letter is a broad indicator. identifying actual strengths and weaknesses are far more important. the grade relates specifically to the assessment criteria for the studio. look at those, and ask your studio tutor where your project had weaknesses.

maybe your tutor was a little off with the grade. it happens, but it is equally common for work to be graded too high. it evens out more or less in the end.

... but don't neglect the possibility that your work wasn't as good as you thought it was.

my first studio grade in undergrad was a very disappointing C, I went in and asked the prof, why, and he told me up until my last project I wasn't really thinking or doing anything non-standard and from then I received A's or B's until my final grad school semester where I just didn't like the professors, had real jobs & clients on the side that paid and was bored out of my mind with that studio.

I attended a university in Germany for nearly 2 years, each studio semester there was only ONE (1) equivalent of an A given out, a few B's, and mainly C's and just as many D's as B's. Trust me there was no dispute why the 'A' was an 'A'...that was the idea if you want an A do this level of work...


I think US studios are way too kind and if you're bitching about a B good luck becoming a designer at a firm in the proffesion...not that a B means you are bad, just that clearly negative critism ticks off your ego and ego's at entry level don't help.

I received 62% in studio, under our system all tutors congratulated me as being part of the higher echelon of grades, class average is 50%, i thought it was somewhat bulshit, but it was among the high end. My parents and me felt bad making me uncompetitive that other university's give A's and B's where in mine, one student will get an A every few years. (They have now changed the system to more like the americans who give so many A;s, i presume to be competitive, and a handful of A's are received every year by students.) That said, no employer has ever asked for grades (including oma), and I got jobs in my favorite offices. Just show my portfolio....

Indeed bring on PASS/FAIL system, no grades! I find them useful for everything other than exams that can be quantified such as mathematics.

also i have also thought the guys who got A's or B's have been pretty bad, and I have never understood why they got A's.

But i remember a professor told me in my first year of undergrad, The guy who gets an A can become an academic, the guy who gets the B did well, but will end up working for the guy who gets the C. The Guy who get's the D will be the assistant of the B and Mr. E will not finish school.

It's quite an interesting analogy, and basically means there a lot to more to success and achievement than just school. If you define success, you will not find the answer, someone who sacrifices many things in order to be great at one thing. This was definition given at a latest TED talk by Alain de Botton. So maybe work how you are better than the guy who got the A because you got B and next time aim for a C.

(Eisenmann does not employ A students, he employs B students for this reason.)

I had Kipnis as my prof and he once said at the beginning of his course "Only God get's an A in my studio, and I get a B" And actually it's pretty fair. Any project/design can always be improved changed and can never be perfect so why would anyone get an A!

I also had Eisenman as my prof and he said at the beginning of the studio that if you are last for the desk crits, means that you are the worst student in his class, and if you are first that meant that he's really into your concept. So many people fought and tried so hard not to be in the last place, but it was ALWYAS the same students no matter how hard they tried.

j'aime the german archtiect I knew, who had his own successful firm was a C student and he always told me:

A students become academics
B students become good designers working for C students
C students became the BOSS.

when I returned to the states this actually made a lot of sense, because the only C students I knew were out drinking every night making frients, and sure enough when I graduated post 9/11 those guys had jobs right away, because they had friends!

certain truth to that eigen and j'aime.

On other hand is also likely that the C students just suck and will become office fodder....



from what i remember the most social students and best networked were the ones who got A's. it is about cultural IQ as well as the reglar type.

which is kind of interesting. architecture is a profession that requires some social skills to be good designer? sounds plausible to me, and explains why there are so few reclusive anti-social brilliant architects out there. we are all flamboyant loud and charming and/or arrogant.



for what is worth i was A student and I am the boss. Now that i think on it our clients are also very high achievers.

anyway, grades in themselves don't matter. working bloody hard matters. working bloody hard can be balanced with partying bloody hard, but best is combination of both!

i give way too many A's and A-'s and few B's. at the end even the A- students look at me if i have failed them and B students are totally devastated. i don't feel the grade system is tailor made for art and architecture schools as a lot of the final product is subjective. i give a lot of consideration to how and how much they participate in the discourse, how they meet the deadlines and manage their times, how much they research and develop the projects and how focused they are.
some of the projects i feel very strong about are sometimes disliked by some other instructors. go figure.
on the other hand, most students know where they are at as far as their projects go.

you got a B?!?!?! you will NEVER become an architect..

RodgerT,

I have always been an A student until a this Prof. gave me a B+ in his design studio!

what a nerve! didn't he know?

Ya man -- I remember in grad school grades seemed to be a big deal to people. In the end of the day they really don't mean anything. As long as you do well enough to stay in your program, have good professional relationships with your professors, and then produce good work out of the entire experience that will impress prospective employers.

Remember, in grad school the idea is to maintain a 'B-' average or above. I've known of people who were asked to leave because they could not meet that criteria. But normally, I've noticed professors are very accomodating to people and some people have to really screw up BADLY to get kicked out of the program.

grades don't mean shit. One man's C is the equivalent to another man's A. Grading is training for the real world. If the prof likes you and you contribute, work hard, are able to articulate your ideas clearly, and the prof generally likes you you'll most likely get an A. It's the same way hiring (and firing) decisions are made in the real world, usually has a lot less to do with how good you are.

My first architecture teacher siad this.

"The students who get A's will someday become teachers.
The students who get B's will someday work for those students who got C's."

he said that too? wow, that idea really gets around.

zaha was an exceptionally good student. so were rem and peter, etc. they are maybe making buildings for the C students? is that what the saying means? i can believe that.



your experience rings bells orhan.

grades in grad school are just as useful...as an extra asshole on an elbow

in the uk - marking is much more aligned with where it should be - generally 2-3% only will get an A - and we have an external examination process here with all courses in all unis - marks have to be internally moderated by other staff and then the externals come in and review the work. in the case of graduating students, all students are interviewed by externals [generally 30 min] with all their final year work

externals report back to the faculty meeting course standards, marking standards and make great recommendations on where we might improve teaching delivery and skills -- i really think this process is great!

the big problem in the US which everyone knows over inflates grades [harvard recently has been taken to the coals!] is that to stay in grad school you must maintain a B or better average - if you're taking design study [say 6-8 credits] get a C in that and your toast!

i once had a teaching post at a very well known school [us] and was told that i had to switch the C's to inc. and allow the students to a second effort over christmas break - else the students would be kick out and $$$ would fall short -

i have to say marking in the US was really varied - at two [grad school] of the three unis i was at - i will say staff marked based on the student and not on the work at all - marking was decided in about 5 minutes - no pier review - done and dusted!

in the uk again we have to give formative and summative feedback which articulates where we think the student is and the latter being our final marking scheme.

TED, good points.

I was just having this discussion a few days ago with some people about "over achieving" in school. Two people brought up points that some of their professors graded them harder because the quality of their work was well-above the rest of the class but not above what the professor felt the students could produce.

We also agreed that As were for suckers. An older man near us added that he remembered when going to school in the 50s that getting straight Cs was an accomplishment.

I thought that was interesting-- that being "average" back in the day meant you were doing prettty good!

ted, that is from what i saw as a TA how they did it in my canadian archi-school too. there was a bit of what you describe in the usa as well.

here in japan it is hard to get a bad grade, but the point here is to get into the school (very hard for good schools). getting out is guaranteed.

i don't think A's are for suckers. but, you know, whatever...

from now on I will aim for a C and B in my class! Not just studio, but seminar, history, building tech, etc. Then I'll become the uber boss.

good luck with that afrdzak. ;-)

regarding peer reviews, at my undergrad we had to produce a portfolio every semester, and it was technically our final exam as far as the university was concerned. It had the added bonus that the portfolios could be easily circulated amongst all the faculty teaching the same year's studios. They did this with sticky notes bearing the grades they wanted to give us on them, and any other professor could start a discussion about whether a particular grade may be high or low. Now, this could be tedious if done in detail, so from what we heard in practice usually if you got a B range grade nobody really bothered about you, but they checked over the A's and the C's more carefully to make sure they were given justly. I felt like that was a pretty good system, even though of course there are still times when people don't feel great about the grades they were given. Personally though, while some of them stung at the time, in retrospect I think they were pretty fair, even if the profs were telling me something I didn't like to hear.