The standard grading scale is: 90-100% =A, 80-89% =B, 70-79% =C, 60-69% =D, and 59% -below =F. Grading on a curve moves that scale to account for any flaw in instruction. The most common method is to take the highest score made on a test and use that as the maximum total score. For example you have a 100 question test, with each question worth 1 pt. You have 10 students that took the test. The scores were as follows: Student 1: 91 Student 2: 85 Student 3: 82 Student 4: 81 Student 5: 74 Student 6: 74 Student 7: 68 Student 8: 64 Student 9: 57 Student 10: 50 (Since it was a 100 question test the number correct equals the percent correct) On a normal grading scale student 1 would get an A, students 2,3, and 4 would get B’s, students 5 and 6 would get C’s, students 7 & 8, would get D’s, and students 9 & 10 would get F’s. If you grade on a curve (using the most common method of taking the highest score and making that the maximum score) you would get the following: Student 1: scored 91 out o
…that the performance of students in a class or on a test will be “normally distributed”, or in the shape of a bell curve. Grading on a curve can mean that most of the grades will be Cs; there will be as many Ds as Bs; and, there will be as many Fs as As. My problem with this is that to be normally distributed, a number of other assumptions need to be met. These may or may not be reasonable assumptions in your classroom. Ask your local statistician for those if you are interested. I also am not crazy about doling out an equivalent number of Fs as As. I guess it would depend on what subject we were talking about, what kind of students we were dealing with, and what the purpose of the test was. If I were trying to determine whether the students had mastered X, then I don’t think this grading approach would work well. Either students would know X or they would not. If on the other hand, I had a group of honors mathematics students and I constructed a very challenging test to separate ou
Bell curve grading In education, grading on a bell curve (or simply known as curving) is a method of assigning grades designed to yield a desired distribution of grades among the students in a class. Strictly speaking, grading “on a bell curve” refers to the assigning of grades according to the frequency distribution known as the Normal distribution (also called the Gaussian distribution), whose graphical representation is referred to as the Normal curve or the bell curve. Because bell curve grading assigns grades to students based on their relative performance in comparison to classmates’ performance, the term “bell curve grading” came, by extension, to be more loosely applied to any method of assigning grades that makes use of comparison between students’ performances, though this type of grading does not necessarily actually make use of any frequency distribution such as the b