this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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I keep reading about people grading on a curve and I still can't grasp what that means. Do those teachers have like a set number of A B C, or whatever, they can give out? And if they've run out of A then you get a B? And if the B run out you get a C and so on? That seems a completely intellectually bankrupt practice! If you don't want more than X people passing, then just grade people with percentages and let only the first X highest through and that's it, but don't lie with fake grades! How insane...
basically that, yes.
though in my experience, they'd make the tests so hard that everyone would get failing or nearly failing grades, then curve up so that more people pass and some get As
only issue for them is if the average is 36% but 3 students got high 90s.. makes the curving math a lot more awkward
At my uni they'd take the highest grade of the class and reset that as the max points and grade from there.
So if max points on an exam was 120 and no-one scored higher then an 85, then an 85 would be an A, 75 a B, etc.
I'm a mediocre student but an amazing test taker and used to compete on math teams. So some of the math heavy engineering courses I would get perfect exam scores and sometimes the prof would ignore me as the highest grade. I was frustrated at first because my A didn't mean the same as someone's but I realized later it was to stop me from getting beat up by a bunch of 30 yo guys.
I still think the ABCDF system sounds so... childish? But presented like that I can see how it makes sense. I always thought about more absolute systems as more, eh, honest? More of an absolute value of our worth, but in truth it depends completely on our teachers, so it's not really any "truer" than the letter system. Just a different bias.
I'm glad there are so many interesting answers in this thread :)
Grades in the US are on a 4 point scale, with decimal values between:
A "good" grade in a class is 3.5 or better, and 2.0 is usually barely passing. Letter grades are used through high school, and high school and college use the 4 point scale on transcripts, and people translate to the letter grades for talking with friends.
In assignments, you get a percent rating, with 60% being barely passing. There's a lot of granularity there.
Grading on a curve means the professor expects a certain distribution of scores, so of everyone scores poorly, the test is bad, so the scores are readjusted according to that expected curve. If people outperform, then there's no curve and you get the score you get.
The curve means the class's scores is fit onto a bell curve. X% pass, Y% fail, etc all according to the predetermined standard bell curve. Doesn't matter if the class is full of Einsteins or dunces. If 30% is the highest mark in the class then that's an A+, and so on.
Usually if everyone gets high scores, a curve isn't used. The curve is only used if most people score poorly to make up for a bad exam or something.
You still "need" people to fail, so
No, you don't. That's not how a curve works, the curve merely improves scores. If a curve would lower scores, it's not used.
Not what they did for us.
Do you have more details? Because I've never heard of a curve being used to hurt students in a class, only to help make up for a bad exam.
Grading on a curve is indeed that, and it should be criminalized because of how much it harms students
How does it harm students? A curve is only used if the grade distribution is below expectations. All it does is cover for a bad test or something.
Because if the next cohort is simply performing better you force some students to be graded below their performance, which is unfair punishment, and if they're worse then some will be graded higher. It's especially unfair when the composition of students changes rapidly or when used over very mixed groups of students.
Grading should be decided based on achieved learning targets, not group rank. It's not a fucking sport.
I've never heard of a curve being used to adjust scores downward, only to adjust them upward.
I've seen dozens of examples