What is the curve?
This is the MFAQ, the most frequently asked question. As you know, Harvard, as many other colleges, experiences grade inflation. This is unfortunate, because it allows students less and less to gauge their progress and for students near the AB treshold, it is essentially a matter of luck on which side they fall. The quantisation by letter grades is too rough and with time, most of the grades had been pushed into the A-B range. This discourages top students to work harder (I already have an A) and students with a B grade (I can not get into the A grade). A simple solution to the problem would be to get rid of the quantisation and to submit a number between 0-100 to the registrar, forcing the distribution to have a fixed mean and standard deviation. But the world is not perfect and so, every teacher at the end of the semester ponders over the problem to figure out a “curve”. I keep three constraints fixed: there should be maximally 40 percent A and A- and the average should be near the t
