3 ms·

It's called grading on a curve, and it's (imo, unfortunately) very common in undergraduate courses in the US :)

• katbyte 14y ago
  it was used by many of my math & science classes here in canada, and i'm unsure why it is a problem? The prof would make the test very hard so the average was around 50-70 and then use a curve to get grades.
  • colomon 14y ago
    In my first semester (I think, might have been second) honors calculus class, the (great) teacher got carried away on one midterm. I got something like 40%, and that was the second highest grade in the class, the average was more like 30%. He was so disappointed we didn't do better on that exam...
  • GuiA 14y ago
    Curve grading is just conceptually silly. If a test does indeed cover the material, then answering correctly half of it should lead to a 50%, no more, no less. If curve grading is required because the test doesn't properly assess what the students have been working on, that means the test was bad in the first place.
• auctiontheory 14y ago
  I understand grading on a curve. This is not that. What we're talking about here is remapping a fraction (what the student scored) to a higher-than-equivalent percentage (what the "standard" requires).