Ooops I apologize for not reading thorouhgly
It happens to one of the most famous business schools in my country. Yeah, they won’t let you borrow their notes, destroy your homeworks, etc. Totally killed friendship and teamwork.
Anyways, which US university still does that?
Curves can also hide bad teaching if the students who have the best scores - in a class where there is no mastery of the material - get As. I have always wondered why, even in a hard class, nobody is concerned when the top grade is a 71%. Either something was wrong with the teaching or something was wrong with the assessment, but the root cause is the same. Personally, I would hope that every teacher’s goal is for all the students to knock it out of the park.
It is probably harder to make a test with questions that are just the right level of difficulty than it may seem at first glance. The instructors who have PhDs in the subject and work in the subject every day may find it difficult to see what may be hard or easy questions for undergraduates taking an introductory or intermediate level course.
For example, I remember a course where the instructor wrote a test that resulted in scores ending up being uniformly distributed from 0 to 100 on a 100 point test. However, the sections of the same course taught by two other instructors missed the target – one test was easy, with scores crowded at the top, while the other was hard, with crowded at the bottom.
I do not like grading on a curve, but I can see why it is done. It is less bad than recycling tests like the College Board does, since that enables cheating.