First of all, I am nowhere close to an F (plus I promise I won't get any C or D either), the reason I am asking this question is partly curiosity and partly because I want to see how to interpret B+ that I got last semester. If C is the lowest possible grade one can get in graduate school, this would essentially mean that the translation between graduate and undergraduate grades would be A --> A, A- -->B+, B+ --> B-, B --> C, B- --> D+, C+ --> D-, C --> F. But you see, in the course I got B+ on they were grading by the regular policy that 90% is an A, 80% is a B, 70% is a C, and so forth. So if C for a graduate class is truly equivalent to an F for undergraduate, do you really think they would give an F for 70%? I guess part of the reason they assigned grades this way in that course is that it was 5**/4** level course, meaning that it had both first year graduates in it and senior level undergraduates, and of course you have to grade all students on the same level. But in this case, wouldn't it be better to grade undergraduates easy than to grade graduates hard (I mean back when I was undergraduates I saw plenty of courses curved even to where 60% was an A, but I remember only one example of undergrad course where 90% was a C due to the opposite curve).
Anyway, back to what I was going to ask. Even if you forget that course where I got B+, I still think its weird that graduate grades are compressed so that C is the lowest possible grade. I mean I understand the whole thing about "academic politeness", but if C is basically an equivalent to an F, how is it "polite" any more? Then you aren't talking about politeness but rather you are talking about blatant relabeling, which serves no purpose at all. Now, in order for it to be politeness, there should be some remote possibility of getting an F, even if it would be very hard to get an F. Which leads me to asking the following question: suppose there is a student who does absolutely no work at all, they haven't submitted a single homework, and skipped all the exams. Will they get an F or will they still get a C?
And here is another interesting question. Back when I was an undergraduate, over a decade ago, I took a certain graduate level course, but I was struggling with that course so I made it into pass/not pass. Now, the way this stuff works is that graduate student has satisfactory/unsatisfactory, where B is satisfactory and C is unsatisfactory, while undergrad has pass/not pass where C is pass and D is not pass. An undergrad taking grad course would still have pass/not pass. Anyway, since my grade wasn't posted yet, I emailed the instructor asking what I got, and she told me I got C+. But, via the above explanation, C+ ended up being P on my transcript! Now, if I were to get a plain C, that would have been P as well. So if in graduate school one can get plain C by not doing any work at all, then an undergraduate can take a graduate class on pass/not pass basis, never show up, and get a P. Which is why it would make a lot more sense if someone had to do at least a minimal amount of work for a C and could get a D or F for if they don't do it. Which again leads me to the question I am trying to ask: is it possible to get a D or an F in graduate level course if you try super hard to fail, such as never show up?
P.S. When I googled this thing I saw some people saying that it depends on department. Well I did my first Ph.D. in Physics and now I am getting second Ph.D. in Math. So the B+ I got was in math, but I got some Bs back when I did my physics one as well. As far as the C+ I got when I was undergraduate (which became P) was in the math class. So I would be curious to interpret grades in both of those departments.
