Grade - Definition and Overview

A grade may refer to many different concepts, including:

• in various contexts: Each item in a (generally ordered and finite) collection of symbols or designators used as a particular grade system to distinguish and rank corresponding groups, where distinct members or instances of each group are regarded as sufficiently similar (in attributes such as performance, quality, size, age, etc.) to be classified together. Such collections are typically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and A, A-, B+, ... , D-, F, or Regular, Super, Premium. Examples of grade systems occur
  • in education, either
    • a teacher's evaluation of a student's work: see Grade (education), or
    • a student's level of educational progress in school, see:
      • Education or Education by country
  • in sports, degree of difficulty of a challenge, including:
    • Grade (climbing)
    • Grade (bouldering)
  • in telecommunication: Grade of service
  • in fueling internal combustion engines: Grade of gasoline and Fuel performance rating
• in geography, railroad engineering, and other contexts sensitive to topography, a percentage ratio of elevation differential to distance (also called gradient, and a case of mathematical slope): see grade (geography)
• in mathematics, a unit for the measurement of plane angles: see gon
• see also graded vector space, graded algebra.
• in moving-image (cinema and television) post-production, to grade is to perform the process (also called "color-timing") of color-correcting images.
• Grade is a Hardcore punk rock band of the Emo genre.
• in pathology, a number given to categorize the aggressiveness of a tumor, with 1 being the lowest and least aggressive; usually on a 4 point scale.
• in mining the amount of metal in ore, eg. the gold grade was high in the vein.

See also: Rating