After I installed OFB and FFS (and got a RAM upgrade so I could enjoys Sims 2 again) I went to check on my University Sims and found that they are all stuck at the lowest 'class performance' setting. Most already have all they need to have the full meter, but none would be able to pass their classes if left as they are. I checked my whole university, including the stock characters in their houses that I never played before, and tried to see if their meters would increase as I got the skills needed but nothing makes them change. I tried moving a few out and into new places, entered a completely new Sim into an empty lot, and they all inherit the same problem. I checked with SimPE and TS2E and the college Sims that had almost full meters still do. And I ran all the patches I could. I looked through all the help here and few other sites and believe some others had this issue but I never found a solution. Any ideas?

Something in your downloads folder might be causing a the glitch. First, backup your entire My Docs/EA Games/Sims2 folder. Then move your Downloads folder to your desktop. Test the game to see if the class performance meter is fixed. Also, see this FAQ for more information.

For the time being, you can help you Sims by using the education adjustor from www.insimenator.net. It's a part of the great Insimenator. ( You can spawn it by clicking somewhere on the ground and saying" spawn education adjustor").
There you can give your Sim the desired grade.
I
imagine that once the level is set, it will become dynamic as well.

If you open a Sim file in Sim Pe you can also see if some fields are not set yet. ( I had this with Sims that I had resurrected from the Sims Black Hole where Sims sometimes get lost in) and then sometimes they would just lay there as dead, only breathing, but not able to interact on any level. But as I say, within SimPE you can set personality, school, skills, gender preferences etc.

But really, if this is happening to all your Sims, maybe you should uninstall the EP in question and reinstall it.

I had this same thing happen to only one sim in my game, out of the four colleges I have. When she went to the secret society lot, her meter changed back to normal, but everytime she went back to the dorm, it would show that she didn't earn her skills again. Though I haven't technically "fixed" the problem, if I send her off for her finals from a community lot or the secret society lot, she gets full marks. The only thing about going from the secret society lot is that your semester money is added to the society house money.

But if it's happening now that you've got the newest EP, then yes, it could also be something in your downloads, that is not OFB compatible. I had to get rid of a whole lot of things that started flashing blue after NL, and I had some careers downloaded from here that kept coming up with error-messages after I got NL as well.

hoistimus, are you using a burned copy of the game, or an image, or are you running from the original disc?

Well, I've done a complete uninstall and reinstall of all the EPs and the FFS. I put back my neighborhood except the downloads folder, and started up the game, to have the same problem. The lots I used do not have any custom content, as they were new sims to college that I put in empty or prebuilt home lots.
All my CDs are originals.. but I did get a hack for no-cd for the FFS, since my computer is having a hard time reading that disk most of the time after it's installed.. maybe I'll have to buy another copy of it and reinstall it, could be a bad install that it keeps repeating..

edit: I played a sim for a bit and did a bunch of stuff to increase his class performance well beyond the little bar I could see. Checked SimPE to see his status, and found his effort was almost full on that meter. Soo.. time to check to see if he can pass his final exam

The no-cd crack is what is causing your problem.

The college progress bar is purely cosmetic; you can still get an A+ if you get your perfomance up. Unfortunately it is not the only problem you will have. All your school age sims will randomly have their school data reset, meaning they will suddenly have a grade of C and be back in public school. This is intentional breakage by Maxis to discourage cracks.

I went through the same thing myself, for much the same reason; my OFB disk did not install properly and I had to find a work around, so I thought I should preserve the disk. I ended up reverting to the original EXE when I discovered that was the source of my problems. Thankfully it plays fine off the disk now that I got it installed, so no worries. It was annoying, though.

hoistimus, the only suggestion that I can give you is the remove any trace of the image and install/run the game off the disk as intended by EA/Maxis. Until you do that, we cannot give you any more help on this matter.

If the problem is just a disk that won't read properly, you should be able to exchange it for another copy of the same, rather than having to pay for a second one.