Students should be careful when using the word “curve.”  It is easy to assume that if a professor is curving the final grade, or exam grades, that it means your grade will probably go up.  The real definition of this word is that the distributions of the scores should fit underneath a bell curve, and through normalization, they will.  In simple language, some teachers drop your grade down.

AKA:

You do the work.
You get the grade.
You take that grade, minus one.
That’s the grade you get.

Very few classes do this, but they are out there.  One class that the professor did this in, it did not end up mattering because it was such a difficult class his only option was to raise grades.

Enter: Physics lab.
Physics lab 1:  I did the work, I earned the grade, I had a SOLID 4.0.  But imagine the confusion when I received my final grades, only to see a glaring 3.5.  This is due to a strange phenomenon known as normalization.  They take all the sections of labs, put them together, and then decide how many people should have each grade.  This is to even out differences in grading

Physics lab 2: I am in danger of this same thing happening again.  My lab section has the highest average of all of my TA’s sections.  Hands down higher.  He told us that we could all just….not show up for lab one day and still have a higher class average than all his other classes.  Just because we’re doing the work quicker and faster, not all of us can have the grades we deserve.

And then teachers wonder how the hell I have no motivation to put extra effort in.