eli5: How do classes that mark on a curve work?

Question

eli5: How do classes that mark on a curve work?

In: 1

Answer 1

There are different ways to do it, but basically it means grading students relative to each other.

The simplest is to just say that whatever the top score in the class is, you then say that’s 100% and grade everyone based on that. So if you have 1000 possible points in a class and the best student gets 800, you grade everyone out of 800.

There’s also more complicated ways to do it, where you have buckets and you determine how many students ought to be in each bucket based on the expected distribution of scores, so the top 10 students get an A, next 20 get a B, next 20 get a C, etc etc you can get very into the weeds with it.