I strongly believe that having a grading system where a number of people need to have A for the grading system to be considered fair is harmful. In the universi

I strongly believe that having a grading system where a number of people need to have A for the grading system to be considered fair is harmful. In the university I went to in France, exams are made so that the gaussian curve of results in centered around 60% (12/20 in the french way of counting) with grades under 40% considered to be failing grades. Once you start having this kind of grading system, it forces the examinator to make the test hard and for that the best way is to have long tests (around 3-4 hours) where you have to apply the knowledge you gained on small projects (example a compilation exam where you have to work on a simplified subset of a natural language). Added to this, there was a healthy distrust of multiple choice questions and teachers who asked too much of them were considered by everyone as being lazy. Contrast this with tests I took in the US at RIT where the questions were "When was the OpenGL committee founded?" (for a computer graphics class) or other such useless questions. Homework was also different between both universities... In France, the graded homework were mostly medium to large size projects that took quite a few weeks to complete. In the Us, there was a much a higher number of busy work with small simple to do exercise that didn't really make student learn a lot (although I did have a few interesting homework projects so not everything was bad)...