Originally Posted by Gilda

I completely agree that that competetive curving is a bad system for grading. Take Sissy, for example. Put her in a typical high school physics class with typical high school students, and she's going to be one of the elite students in the class. Put her in the same class, but make the other students Newton, Copernicus, Eienstein, Hawking, and Kepler, and she'd be the worst student in class, even with the same performance. Evaluation should be criterion based, not competetive.