Question

, explain what your interpretation of "grading on a bell curve" means. Try imagining that you are a teacher and wish to grade on a curve, how would you go about instituting this policy on your students' exam grades? Also add why you think grading on a curve can be a beneficial/fair practice or not?

Answer 1

In true use of bell curve grading, students' scores are scaled according to the frequency distribution represented by the Normal curve. The instructor can decide what grade occupies the center of the distribution. This is the grade an average score will earn, and will be the most common. Traditionally, in the ABCDF system this is the 'C' grade. The instructor can also decide what portion of the frequency distribution each grade occupies and whether or not high and low grades are symmetrically assigned area under the curve (i.e. if the top 12% of students earn an 'A,' do the bottom 12% fail or might only the bottom 5% fail?). In a system of pure curve grading, the number of students who will receive each grade is already determined at the beginning of a course.

example :

if the top score on an exam is 90% , all students' absolute scores (meaning they have not been adjusted relative to other students' scores in any way) will be increased by 10% before being compared to a pre-determined set of grading benchmarks (for example the common A>90%>B>80% etc. system). This method prevents unusually hard assignments (usually exams) from unfairly reducing students' grades but relies on the assumption that the top student's performance is a good measure of an assignment's difficulty.

why grading on a curve can be a beneficial/fair practice :

Curved grading is beneficial because it factors in the difficulty a group of test-takers had with a test. If the majority of students have high (or low) scores then the middling grade will be adjusted there and higher or lower grades awarded based on this performance. In addition, the curve removes the problem of deciding grades that fall very near a grade margin.

Clustering of marks establish where the margin should be placed.

why grading on a curve may not be a beneficial/fair practice :

However, grading in this way is essentially normative; scores are referenced to the performance of group members. There must always be at least one student who has a lower score than all others, even if that score is quite high when evaluated against specific performance criteria or standards. Conversely, if all students perform poorly relative to a larger population, even the highest graded students may be failing to meet standards. Thus, curved grading makes it difficult to compare groups of students to one another.

P.S. (please upvote if you find the answer satisfactory)