<p>when people talk about class curves, are they saying that the grades are compared with those in the whole class(say, everyone taking math 115) or just those within the individual discussions?</p>
<p>It varies depending on the course.</p>
<p>For most classes that have a lecture and then multiple discussion sections, the tests given are uniform across all sections, and the grading scale is set uniformly across sections. The only kind of exception I can think of for this is for certain classes where you have lots of essay questions, because the person running your discussion usually grades those, and how each discussion leader grades may vary.</p>