It’s been almost two weeks since my final exam and I still had not received my results. This worried me. I’m the worrying kind. I got an email back from my marker that the class average for the final had been only 59% and that they had applied to have everyone’s mark raised 5% or 1 letter grade. Is this grading on a curve? I’ve never had this happen so I seek your expertise in such matters. Me? I got more than 59%. Okay, not a tonne more but more. 
Honestly? It was the toughest final exam I’ve ever taken. My final mark for the course will be a B+ which makes very, very happy indeed. You can’t see it but I did a little dance when I got the news.
Not much else going on. I knit and knit and knit as the Christmas deadline appraoches. The gods throw more and more snow at me in an effort to have me do some shoveling so that I will have at least a bit of physical activity. Snort.
Took a sock off the needles today and promptly cast on its mate. I also cast on a hat. After work it was a bit of grocery shopping. Just in case it does snow like the dickens I will have a turkey in the house ready to be cooked up and eaten. This is important. There is nothing worse than not getting turkey when one expects, nay, deserves turkey! And gravy of course. Mmmmmmm….gravy.
Okay, back to knitting and watching Little Britain USA. Keep warm everyone!
A B+ would make me very, very happy, too! Congratulations!
Congrats!!!
What you describe isn’t really grading on the curve, exactly, but close enough. Whatevs…a B+ deserves a yarn spree. Wait…you already did that at Red Bird Knits (BTW, I hate you for spreading the news about their sale…LOL).
Congratulations!
I’m only in high school, but we get graded on a curve all the time. Our teachers usually favor what they call a bell or Z curve, which raises people who did really, really badly more than those who did well. Usually teachers defend this by saying that they’re raising student’s grades to what they deserve. After all, if you studied really hard and mastered the material, than you hardly deserve to fail, do you? Hope that helps you out, and I hope you did well on your exam!
It sounds to me like based on the results of the exam, that they are indeed “curving” the grade, essentially re-scaling the letter grades to match the overall performance. Obviously many of your classmates found the exam even more challenging that you did! But that they are having to do this makes me wonder if this is a new exam? As in, not the one used in previous semesters?
Congrats on the B+! I understand exactly how you feel!
I don’t think it’s curving the grading scale, per se. Everybody’s grade is being raised, so it usually means that the grading scale was out of whack to begin with, or that the instructor who wrote the exam overestimated what he or she could reasonably cover in the lecture.
This kind of thing is fairly routine. Sometimes it works the other way around when the grades are artificially inflated by an overly generous grading scale.
At any rate, congrats on the B+!