Curves benefit classes

What is this magical “curving” that saves grades from plummeting after a hard test and even boosts some students’ grades above the 100 percent mark? Curving is the distribution of grades among a class to form a bell curve, but to students, it means a whole lot more. 

In this system, the number of people receiving each letter grade is predetermined. Hypothetically, if 20 percent of a class is supposed to receive a “B” grade on a certain test, then the test scores would be raised or lowered so that roughly 20 percent of the class gets the “B.”

That raises the question of whether curving is actually helpful to a class. Do students ultimately benefit from a class that curves its grades as compared to one that doesn’t? Do curves also encourage better learning in a classroom environment?

Since intelligence is and always will be relative to others, curving will aid a class to become successful. 

For example, if everyone had an IQ of 180, then one’s intelligence would be considered only average, since no one person has an advantage over another. In this situation, no one can be considered smart. Curving helps represent this idea of relative intelligence as only a certain number of people can achieve the top grade.

Furthermore, if a teacher made an extremely hard test and the average grade was a D+, curving would be helpful to the class since the average grade could be raised to a C+, instead of the initial D+. It wouldn’t be fair to have everyone’s grades suffer. 

Also, if everyone in the class gets an A on a test, that doesn’t necessarily signify everyone in the class understands the material; instead, it could mean that the test was too easy. With curving, teachers can make tests excruciatingly hard to see who really understands the material, then reward those students by curving their grade to an A.

A popular argument against curving is that only those who are at the top get to “set” the curve and benefit from it, while those with lower grades earn low marks. 

Contrary to what people think, rewarding the elite, as curving does, actually helps the entire class get better. Rather than giving up, those with lower grades will help each other to produce better results on the next test. 

Some may say that the competition is unhealthy because students will compete and develop an dishonest and insincere attitude toward their peers. However, curving actually brings out healthy competition as it motivates people to study harder and to try their best to retain all the information that they learn in class. 

In short, curving is extremely beneficial for students. It represents the relative intelligence of students and lets teachers truly test the the class’s knowledge of the subject at hand. Although many already do, more teachers should start curving tests.