Were the grades distributed in a bell curve? Most of the large classes with curves that I saw were in fact distributed this way. No one was pushed into a grade they didn’t clearly deserve. The curves I have seen for small classes were often not bell shaped and the lines between the grades were drawn as much as possible between natural groupings so that the same grade reflected as much as possible the same performance. You seem to want to give different grades to students whose scores were substantially the same.