I looked online to see if I could find examples of actual curves from large college classes, but didn’t find any.
However, in regards to the suggestion that grades might be lower this year because the students didn’t study as much, I think that’s an extremely unlikely explanation for any large STEM class. Do you really believe that this year’s 200 organic chem students are a bunch of slackers compared to the 200 premeds who took it last year? Or is it just possible that the exam was harder this year? What happens when professors change–do they write exams of the same difficulty? Also, it’s been my observation that new teachers and professors always expect more of students until experience tempers the expectations. So with each change of staff, the students should just suck it up when grades are low?
“Humanities teachers assign grades that are based on the students’ work, not based on how well they did compared to their peers.” My humanities assignments generally had a letter grade slapped on them with no indication of why it was graded that way, maybe a few words of comments but nothing detailed so that I would know exactly what criteria I met and exactly where I was lacking. And you’re saying that an intro freshman humanities course is graded the same as a senior level seminar with no regard for the level of the students? So, freshmen get a lot of Cs and Ds in humanities courses, and as they improve their experience and skills, the grades get better? That was not at all my observation. Because the expectations are not based upon the students’ abilities but upon some absolute scale of perfection that is revealed to the professor but nonetheless a secret to the students?
My STEM assignments, I could see what exactly earned what points.
My hs rising junior has submitted a lot of writing to various venues and contests and it’s clear the subjectivity of evaluating it is huge.