>Professors sometimes attempt to combat "grade inflation" by giving ridiculously hard exams (coughAndrew Ngcough), but IMO all this does is bring to the fore un

>Professors sometimes attempt to combat "grade inflation" by giving ridiculously hard exams (coughAndrew Ngcough), but IMO all this does is bring to the fore uninteresting factors Agreed. I am not a fan of the testing strategy where the average is a whopping 30% and a curve is used to bring scores back within the normal letter grade buckets. Testing relative performance at this level encourages students to study exclusively "to the test". It reaches the point where gaining inside knowledge about the possible contents of the next exam by hounding professors/TA's or analyzing a friend's exams from last semester takes precedence over comprehensive learning, since the difference between a C and an A can be as tiny as predicting the presence of one particular question and nailing it from rote memorization. Such a deep curve also discourages students from studying collaboratively, since getting a good grade relies on X other students getting a worse score.