<p>The only part of this that is unusual to me is that the undergrad curve is tougher - normally, one would expect it to be the reverse. I still don’t see the unfairness - or at least, it seems no more or less fair than any other situation in which there is a curve. The presence of grad students isn’t an issue; think of it as two separate classes sharing the same space.</p>
<p>Even the easier curve for grad students may, as others mentioned, make sense in certain circumstances. Perhaps these are graduate students whose work is tangential to the subject of the course but who nonetheless need to take it to fulfill a requirement, or because it is helpful for their work to have some grounding in the subject. For instance, students in a government program might need to take one non-intro statistics course even if they aren’t doing a quantitative track, but might be relatively weaker math students than the undergraduates likely to sign up for the course.</p>
<p>In that case, it would be counterproductive for the graduate program to hold their students to the standard of the undergraduates. Even once a student pick a major, a university has some interest in an undergraduate getting a broad education. In graduate school, students are being pushed to find a focus and specialize, so while you might want someone studying government theory to get a reasonable grasp of statistics as well, you don’t want to force him or her to devote copious time and energy to what should be a sideline course - the goal isn’t excellence, as it is for the undergraduates, it is proficiency. Still unusual that the curve would be harder for undergrads in any course with enough graduate students for there to be a curve for them at all, but not inexplicable. </p>