<p>well starting from the bottom up, i was thinking the same thing as stonecold…well not in that much detail but i was wondering where u go to school?</p>
<p>No offense but some of the things you said sounded a bit ridiculous…</p>
<p>First of all i think it is important to mention that i go to “a grade inflated school” as sakky would say.</p>
<p>To start off with my two cents in this discussion about curves, I find curves to be VERY fair and I find anyone who blames the curve for the grade they got is simply trying to find a scapegoat for their own shortcomings. The way a curve is done is that the average letter grade is determined…in my “grade inflated” school that usually ranges from a B+ in some physics and math courses I’ve taken to a C+ in some engineering courses that I will be taking. Next it is determined whether a standard deviation away from that mean will be a third of a letter grade, two thirds, or a full letter grade. If you guys remember from your high school math, 1 standard deviation encompasses approximately 67% of the class while two SDs encompass about 99%. From this explanation you can clearly see that not all curves will be the same…they will differ from class to class and from school to school. Furthermore, yes, it is true that a curve means that you are “competing against the other students” but it is also a way to compensate for the difficulty of the test! Say, for example, you study for 100 hrs for an orgo exam (this is alot for all u overachievers) and then u walk into a midterm knowing the material down COLD and I as the teacher hand out an exam that is so ridiculously easy that the guy who studied for 10 hrs pulls a 90 and you get a 100, and the average was a 95…does that mean everyone gets an A? is this fair to the person who studied much more but could not show it any more because the test was so easy. Alternatively, say we use the same two people but this time the test is EXTREMELY hard…person who studied alot gets a 40% and person who studied little gets 25%…does this mean that you both get Fs? Does the first get a D and the other get an F? is it your fault that the test was really hard or really easy? Then again with a curve, the difficulty of the test is normalized against the performance of the students and i think that is the best way to be fair in science and math classes since professors sometimes cannot really predict how simple or difficult a test will be and thus the best way to set a fair grading scheme is by the performance of the class. When someone says that the curve failed them, that is BS…for example sakky’s friend who got an 80 and the avg was a 95…its not the “curve’s fault” that he got a bad grade, its just that the test was easy but he didnt know as much as he needed to to do well…if there was no curve this would be penalizing the individuals who did well and the test just happened to be super easy just as in the first example i gave. The only thing that can be deemed unfair about a curve is the median grade, but however, this can be justified (and i know alot of people are going to disagree with me about this) by the fact that at more prestegious/selective schools, the student body is assumed to be more intelligent/hard working and thus those who do average deserve to get a better grade than those who do average at a less selective school where either the tests are not as hard or the competition is not as tough.</p>