Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/...

There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.

I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving grades.

It makes sense when applied across multiple instances of a test, if one cohort does terribly curve up, one really well curve them down relative to the overall distribution of scores.

But yeah within a single assignment it makes no sense to force a specific distribution. (People do this maybe because they don’t understand?)

Even in that case it doesn't make sense. Why should the underperforming cohort be rewarded for doing poorly?

Did the cohort due poorly or were the tests given to that cohort harder than in previous years? Or was the teacher a more difficult grader than others? You're jumping to the conclusion that the cohort was underperforming just because the grades were lower when other things out of their control could have been involved.

Tests are generally almost identical YoY where as humans are all very different! I think I'm making the simpler argument here