Why don't schools in the Sims have actual grades, instead of just elementary school and high school?

Probably cuz there's no gradual aging. It's not really necessary if all the kids are the same age as all other kids and all teens the same age as all other teens. We're really missing a lot of life stages in Sims 4. It's still my fav game of all time, but I'd love to see a difference between a 13 and a 17 year old, a 2 year old and a 4 year old etc.

It’s a nice idea but it would probably look weird, as all kids and teens look the same age.....

That would require chopping up the lifestages of "child" and "teen" into a lot of little subgenres, which would be hard if not impossible, to mesh with our being able to adjust Sim lifespans AND adjust the length of individual seasons. It's already pretty awkward with situations in which a Sim can be a Young Adult in spring, and an Elder by winter. The period of Sim-relative time in which a Sim is a child and a teen doesn't translate cleanly to the number of seasons that pass, so designating which exact year of age (and corresponding grade level in school if we go by age and bypass the idea of advanced or repeated grade levels) would be difficult.

I think to keep them from being Young Adults while in 6th grade, we'd have to see a grade level change per day or something.

"LeanneStrong57;d-982757" wrote:
This would make the game more realistic/

Did you mean actual grades such as D+ or A- or did you mean what year of school they are attending, such as second grade compared to fifth grade? Yeah, TS4 is infamous for no depth, actual year of attendance is probably too hard and expensive to show the differences in work and work loads and tasks, projects etc.