<p>As a prospective international student I would like to ask the following.
On the grading system once at college/university: I have heard sometimes about professors giving only a certain number of A's, B's and C's on a test so therefore students in the same course are competing with each other (so-called Bell curve or something like that?). That is also why maybe students in American schools are less sharing notes and homework assignments with each other than we are maybe used to here in Europe.</p>
<p>Could anyone elaborate a little about this habit? Is this done as a rule by all or only by certain number of professors? Does this only happen at graduate level or certain study programs? </p>
<p>I know this is a little bit off topic, but hopefully someone can shed more light on this. Thanks!</p>
<p>This happens primarily in large science classes. This does tend to make students a bit more competitive, especially pre-med students, who are often taking lots of big, curved science classes all together, and who think that their prospects for med school will be doomed by a single B (which is not so far from the truth). Other than pre-meds, though, most people will still be willing to study together, share notes, etc, even in a curved class. It also depends on the school -- the student body at a school like Johns Hopkins has a very different attitude (on average) about collaborative learning than a school like Brown, even within pre-meds and science students.</p>
<p>Other profs in humanities or social sciences (especially Economics) may also curve large classes, but it's much less common.</p>
<p>It is called "curving" where grades are determined by scores of the whole. For example, in a 100 point test, the highest might be 88, most in the 60's, and those in the 80's might get an A and those in the 60's a C and you get a grade distribution that looks like a Bell curve. Most often it depends on the professor, and you can have various methods of curving. Then, even at the same university, you might have curving in many courses but little or none in others -- for example, it is not unusual to find curving at a university by many professors but few of them from the engineering department. As one engineering professor from UIUC once put it -- "I don't curve. If everyone gets below 60, everyone flunks, but if everybody were to score high 90s on my tests I might start to curve just so I can give them all C's." Some colleges, like Princeton, because of criticism of grade inflation, have adopted policies limiting the percentage of students who can get A's in a course (although the percentage is somewhere in the 35% range). On the other hand, places like Georgia Tech have not taken steps to change their system even though it did a study and it became "concerned" with "rampant" grade inflation because the average engineering student's GPA had moved from an acceptable 2.5 to a "concerned" level of 2.7 over a period of 20 years (of course at many colleges with a lot of grade inflation many would consider 2.7 as virtually flunking out). Note, I am not sure where you get your info that most students are unwilling to share notes and homework assignments. Most actually are willing to work with others in a group to study and do assignments. However, you can get courses where the rule is that you cannot share homework answers with others (because you are doing it for part of your grade) and some projects are expected to be done without aid from others.</p>
<p>As an instructor of physics I can tell you that it is not generally true. As long as you perform in my class (or any science class I know about), you will get your A. Of course, it is quite possible that some particular faculty member may have that particular policy. And I never curve either. Which means that depending on a test I may either end up with 50% As or no As or even no Bs at all.</p>