Its raw scores, everyone in the class can succeed spectacularly or fail miserably in isolation. The only time the group matters in a mark is when its group work like my IT project.
Hehe well nothing like MY IT project since the other 2 members of my project team vanished 2 months before the end of the semester leaving me to build a completely new project from scratch and do 8 months of work in around 7 weeks. Still, I got a HD and they failed so "woohoo!" me and fuck them...

I maintained my 4.0. I was a little worried about my compilers course (Software Engineering), but it went smoothly.

So is that a 4.0 out of 4.0?
WOW

I don't even remember my exact University results and can't find my degree to check. But I know it's a B.A with honors (UK system).

It's very difficult to compare grades from different countries. All of the grades I've gotten in my life have been on the Danish 13-scale, which goes:
00, 03, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13
which is really weird, but it's what I'm used to. 6 is the minimum necessary to pass a subject. However, in the years since I finished school, they've switched to a different scale. I don't know much about the new one except that it ends with 12 instead of 13, and was supposedly made to make our grades more easily comparable to the countries around us. Now, whenever someone I know who's still in school tells me the grade they got on some subject, I have no idea what to say, since I don't know if that is good or bad.

Thats why I like the letter or description system. A High Distinction or an A seems more universal than getting a 27 or whatever weird scale individual schools use

That's very nice. Say, is it usual (in Austalia/other places) to compare yourself/be compared with the other students like this? With a ranking? Or did you just check this for yourself since it's obviously an ego-boost in this case =D. I can't blame you for that, I did the same when I graduated from highschool.
It just seems like a rather stupid official approach to me, but I know we do get foreign students that are very much focussed on how well they do compared to other students. Which can be quite hard on them: our masters programme attracks quite a lot of talented students, which means some suddenly end on the lower end of the scale (while still performing very well). It doesn't matter here, since your grade is (relatively) independed on the performance of the other students, yet they still worry about it.

Well my uni certainly doesn't show a ranking against other students. I am certain I came first in my IT project though, mine was clearly the fanciest and I had the least time to do it.

Australia is shifting towards rankings, which i think is bad. I just got told my rankings. Scores don't necessarily, in the same way raking don't, reflect your performance. For example, 92 was the top mark in our science exam (out of 100). But I don't like rankings as a means of assessment, but I like to have a look to see how I stood.

On the other hand, A's seem to be handed out to anybody. The 13 on the Danish 13-scale was rare. It meant, basically, "not only was the work excellent, but it was also surprisingly independent, and went beyond the scope of the original assignment". I suppose you could call it "above and beyond the call of duty". Incidentally, I got a 13 for my final exam project on my IT studies :-D

What a ridiculous idea. Are they going to use rankings exclusively? What good does that do anybody? With the right (or wrong) combination of teachers and students, the lowest ranking student in one class could actually be better than the highest ranking student in another.

That's basically our High Distinction (I got 3 of those this year)

Personally, I think it's great. One of the greatest satisfactions I've ever received in life was killing the curve in uni. It's a good feeling to know that, not only did you get the highest grade in a class, but if you have a prof unconcerned with outliers, you've also indirectly caused large swaths of the class to fail. I believe Genghis Khan said it best, "It is not sufficient that I suceed - all others must fail."
LOL, there's a quote for you, Anjohl. One of my favorites. Oh and ever read Sadako Ogata? If you're interested in the UN and humanitarian aid she's an interesting one. Very frank, too. What'd you write about anyway - UNISOM I or UNISOM II?
I do, of course, admittedly see certain problems in rankings, hence why raw score is also important. Ditto recognizing outliers that measurably impact the mean.

- Congrats that awesome!
Actually you raise a good point - It's been a long time since any school for me, but here in the US most classes are graded on a "curve" similar to a ranking system. The original idea was given an average class the distribution of grades should look like a Bell Curve. Your final score was based on the performance of others in your class and teachers would adjust your grades accordingly to match the curve.
Unfortunately, every teacher had their own personal version of that philosophy and thus, every teacher had their own arbitrary formula for adjusting your grades. One class I had was like Cioran's. If the highest grade was a 92/100, the teacher would just add 8 points to everyone's grade meaning you could "kill the curve" if you did exceptionally well. In another class your final grade was 10 multiplied by the square root of the raw score. (In the US scores are usually out of 100%, then converted to the GPA 0-4 point scale using an arbitrary formula that differed from school to school). A third actually normalised everyone's score to a bell curve using excel which could be very frustrating if you happened to be doing well in the class only to have your grade lowered because too many people were doing well.
I guess my beef with grading systems in the US is that they are completely arbitrary. My 3.2 in highschool, while kinda useful compared to other kids in my school, meant nothing compared to kids from other schools. I discovered that when I took some college classes back in the day and thoroughly trounced other kids who had academic scholarships (like full rides) simply because they got a 4.0 from their school because their schools boosted grades to look better to the public.

Call me a nutjob if you like but I think education should be about personal development rather than competition. Until information can be installed like software, it has to be individual and personalised and frankly I think anything that alters your performance based on the performance of others is counterproductive.
Think of a kid who's not the brightest and/or doesn't do well in tests but always tries hard, one year he puts in the best effort he ever has but still gets a middling score thats then adjusted downwards because of how other people did. That'd be particularly demoralising and could lead to depression, suicide or even downloading mp3s illegally!!

Agreed. Also, I suppose it could kill support among students. I find it pretty normal to try and help some of my fellow students that are struggling. I'm not sure if I would do that if it meant lowering my own grade, and I think any system that results in this happening is deeply flawed. Education is NOT about competition, or at least, there is absolutely no need to make it about competition.