The averages have become a kind of universal language, with colleges and high schools using them to compare students - the closer to 4.0 the better.

It is to provide some basis for comparing students applying from schools of very different quality and grading standards.

"When you compare students of equivalent intellectual aptitude and past academic achievements, what sets them apart is hope."

The report then dug deeper to compare students of like racial, economic and social backgrounds.

Grade inflation makes it more difficult to compare students who took their exams at different times.

Because there are no national standardized tests, it is also difficult to compare students from one state to another.

The district has done no study comparing students in the two curriculums.

It is effectively a way of comparing students.

Many people share the view that percentile ranks compare students only with one another.

Rank-based grading compares current students to each other, rather than to a standard that may have been set decades before.