system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Grading standards in the US

I'm a post-doc teaching a humanities class at an R-1 in the U.S. I'm originally from Europe and this is my first time teaching in the States. Where I'm originally from, grading is generally tough. Typically most students would get a D or a C, there might be a couple of A's and never A+'s. I know the system is quite different in the U.S., I just don't know exactly by how much.

I've asked colleagues and people in the administration about this, and everyone's answer boiled down to basically "just do whatever you want", which isn't really helping.

I've split the grade between attendance, participation, homework (40%) and a final paper (60%). I have the students work on their papers throughout the class and they can ask me for feedback whenever they want. That way they can always know if they're on the right track and can get a sense of what they should be improving. This is because, for the class I am teaching, I think it's more important for them to be able to do good research on their own and to produce a good quality paper in the end than to just memorize a bunch of facts and dates for a test and then forget everything.

Now of course the issue with this is that since I expect almost all students to hand in a decent paper in the end, almost all of them will get grades in the range of B to A+ and I'm not sure if that is acceptable here. What is your grade distribution generally like?
gpt
Wait until they turn in their first assignment. Read through all of the papers without grading them. You'll have a sense of what you'll consider an A-F. Go back through them and give them a score. Every professor in the United States is different when it comes to grading. Tell them what you expect from them, and they'll figure it out.