<p>So... Does anyone understand how curves are set?</p>
<p>I originally thought curves were designed to ensure a decent distribution (ex. not too many get 5s in an easy year, not too many get 1s in a hard year).</p>
<p>However exams like Chinese and Lit confuse me. Chinese comes out with an absurd like 77% of students getting 5s (granted it's 40% for non-native speakers but still the curve should bring these #s down) but only 7% get 5's on the Lit exam.</p>
<p>I mean there are more examples. ABCalc has 50% 5's. Human Geo has 10%.</p>
<p><a href="http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Student-Score-Distributions-2010.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Student-Score-Distributions-2010.pdf</a></p>
<p>What's the deal? Why such a massive discrepancy? How are they deciding the cutoff 5 score if it has little to do with the average raw score?</p>
<p>Anyone have thoughts on this?</p>
<p>It’s not necessarily done to make a proper distribution, but to show how qualified the students actually are. For example, most kids who take BC are self-selecting and are very exceptional in math. It wouldn’t be fair to only give 5’s to the top 20% who get near perfects when a kid who still gets a very high 70-80% of the questions right would get a 4, when he/she obviously understands the material. That’s why 50% get 5’s because they are good at Calculus and deserve said 5, same for Chinese. And the test taking pool for Literature is much larger in comparison to these exams, probably suggesting that some schools require that students take the exam and such who aren’t actually prepared, because though 8% get 5’s, approximately 30,000 kids getting 5 is still a large number, it’s just that everyone else taking it is actually bad/mediocre at either CR, writing, etc etc.</p>
<p>AB Calc has 20% 5s. The one with 50% 5 is BC: calculus AB subscore.
Also a factor in high BC scores: some take AB, then BC.
What Calculi said is correct.
(Also, Human Geography is low even though it is an easy test because it has a much higher percentage of freshmen taking it).</p>
<p>Interesting fact from the pdf: 30 native Chinese speakers scored a 1.</p>
<p>So I guess they set some arbitrary standard for pass/fail. It just strikes me as odd that exams like Lit and HGeo have such low passing rates and they do nothing to make the exam easier or make sure the material/curriculum from the exam is being related in a more accurate way. Likewise it would seem appropriate to me to make exams with a very high passing rate just a little more difficult. Oh well.</p>
<p>
Did you read the previous posts? Passing rates are not reflective of the exam difficulty.</p>