The curve: the process of adjustment

Hi everyone,

I hope you are doing great. So today I decided to tell you a little bit about my experience with the grading system. I'm going to tell you a little bit about my feelings and experiences regarding my own adjustment process to this new system.

Basically, as some of you might know, here in the US it is common to grade your performance relative to your peers. This, as every system, provide you good and bad incentives as well.

The idea is as follows. You get a grade on the exam and everybody do as well. But the professor need to have some sort of normal distribution of the grades, son the majority of the grades are located about the mean and there exist some relevant variation between the extremes (both the worse and the best student).

This of course provide everyone with good incentives to do your best in order to achieve your best outcome and be on the top of you course.

However, it's is sometimes a source of frustrations and disincentives, since you have done your best, but you end up in the mean of your group, for example. Or maybe your absolute performance, say 90 out of 100, is quite good, but the mean was 88, so it doesn't reflect all the true about your real performance.

Disregarding on how good or bad we can think this system is, the important thing is that of you are not used to it, but you are considering coming to the US, you should definitely take it into account and try to adapt and make the necessary adjustment to your academic dynamic.