More Awesome Than You!

I think I'll always be only a lurker here, but a weird thing happened yesterday in one of the families in my testing neighbourhood and I thought I'd share it with you...

My testing family - Evan (dad), Valerie (mum) ald two children, Trevor and Martha, all CAS-made - were played for a game week. I didn't manage to make parents help Martha with homework until Friday, so her grade (with a little help from hardergrades hack  :)) fell to F. On Friday she has finished all her piled-up homework and had all weekend to gain her logic skill, her brother had C and I had sshack installed, so constant warning messages didn't bother me.

On Sunday afternoon Valerie took kids to community lot. Taxi arrived and three of them got into it, when suddenly a blue car arrived and lady in black emerged from it. I thought "Why?? Doesn't sshack prevent children from Social Worker abduction, if only one child has a bad grade?"

She went straight into the garden, apparently intending to scold Dad, but Evan was too busy with his telescope to even notice her. Social Worker waited a bit and resigned. Meanwhile Valerie and children got out of the taxi, which went away. I was sure that Social Worker will scold Valerie, but she went straight to her car and drove off... Martha and Trevor were spared. Valerie called another taxi and three of them went downtown as if nothing had happened.

I suspect it's a hack conflict somewhere, since I have loads of hack from different sources installed and never even made a proper list of them. Or maybe it's a feature unknown to me? I like the idea of SW giving parents only a warning.  ;) I regret I was too petrified at that time to take screenshots.

"This hack makes the Social Worker behave more reasonably." Yeah, sure.

[Corrected this E to F. Reasons in my post below.]

E? There is no E!

Huh? E? Uh, you mean F right?

Interesting... hrm. An 'E'? I also hope you either meant D, which on regular/standard keyboards is just abouve the 'E' key, or an 'F' which is also in the vicinity of the 'E' key...

Admittedly, I didn't do extensive testing with my hardergrades hack, but as far as I can tell/remember, there shouldn't be an E grade. I'm pretty sure the grades range from A, B, C, D, and F, with +/- possible. The actual hard code breaks it down as follows:

A = 12
B = 9
C = 6
D = 3
F <= 0

Basically, the game normally checks for two things:

1) Is your sim in a (relatively) good mood
2) Does your sim have any incomplete homeworks
 a. If there is only one incomplete homework, then no change in grade
 b. If there is more than one incomplete homework, then your grade drops

If there are no incomplete homeworks and the sim is in a good mood, then your grade should increase, adding 3 'points' to the numerical representation. Any grade that is 12 or higher gets automatically set to just 12, which the game interprets as an A. After this, there is also a chance that the sim can either get an + or a - which I think normally depends on mood. I can't remember exactly off the top of my head.

Anyhew, the only changes I made were to the requirements. It should now require a minimum of a specific skill depending on personality, but also take into consideration other skills, as described in the accompanying rtfm. I'm curious to find out if you actually meant 'E' or if that is only a typo, and possibly due to some bug in my hack. *crosses fingers* I hope not, I feel too lazy about having to look into this right now. :P

Ste

Well, E was not a typo, it was just my bad guess... In my language version of the game there are numbers, not letters, for grades. I was trying to translate it and failed. Well, let's try again: the highest grade is 6+, so it equals to A+, the default grade before first day in school is 4, which I believe is C, and Martha had 2, so it must be F. I'm very sorry, it's just my poor knowledge about foreign grades system...  :)

Syberspunk, your hardergrades works just fine, I love it because I was tired of constant A+ (6+ :)) for everyone. It's invisible to me (other hacks change some things in my game to English, this one doesn't), and I really doubt there are any bugs. What puzzled me was that Social Worker appeared while she should not, and that she didn't do anything. And this has to do rather with sshack, so I thought maybe J.M.Pescado would be interested. It's not a complaint, it was terribly funny, and it's my fault of being regardless to possible conflict hacks. And, after all, a tiny suggestion: maybe she really could come only to scold? Warning messages are far less impressive.  :)

Out of interest, what language version of the game are you running? Just curious :).

My educated guess is Polish. ;)

As for the translation, that was also a good educated guess. I tend to forget that there are other countries out there than just America. ::) Hehe. I kinda had an inkling that you may have been from another country, but I was just worried that something I did caused the game to report E's instead of F's, which I figured would be impossible since I didn't mess around with any of the text.

I had thought about adding some warnings that would explain the requirement of skills. Originally, I was tempted to try and figure out how to make it so that skill level requirements would be highlighted just like they are for Careers, but I got lazy and figured it was more trouble that it would be worth for me to figure out, as well as avoid any potential conflicts with other school related mods.

Anyways, I'm glad it wasn't something that the game actually reported. It's kind of interesting to see how grading systems vary per country. My high school didn't even use the standard letter system. Everything was pretty much graded on a 100% scale and failing was like anything that was below 65, which pretty much was rare, considering the school that I went to. If anything, most people usually got that in gym/PE. :P

Ste

It wasn't a totally innacurate guess though.  There are school systems who do use "E" instead of "F".  The school I went to for instance.  We didn't have "F".  We had "E", of which I only ever got in algebra - yech.
Yes, I am a dumb American and I did go to a dumb American school.  (Which would explain why I am dumb.)

I don't think this is a frequent occurence, but it does happen.

I was talking to my son's high school counselor the other day and he made reference to an "E" grade, which confused me for a moment because there isn't such a grade at my son's school. I just concluded he meant "F" (since yes, that's the grade my son is getting in alegebra *sigh*).

BetsyJayne, I just read your siggie. That's hilarious!!!!
*goes to clean monitor and keyboard, resolving never to read siggies on the work computer again*

schools use "E" becasue "F" stands for fail, and it gives kids poor self esteem...what ever.  If they care about that crap, they will have poor self esteem, because they know that E means they are failing too.

My school uses A, B, C, D, NC
NC stands for No Credit...apparently we had a large group of parents a decade ago who thought that you still got credit in a class you failed!!

I always heard that "E" was for "Effort."

At my school, we do have E's. Although the governement is getting rid of the letter grade system in my state in the next year or so for who-knows-what reason.