I've always loved curved classes because they allow very good professors to give real mindfuck exam questions that cause you to walk away from the test with a new perspective on the material.
Those exams were often the most edifying couple hours of the whole semester. You also got a clear sense of the difference between you and a real master of the material which is a helpful lesson in humility.
I went back to grad school recently and it seems like that mode of testing has gone out of style in the last ten years. The exams I took were geared more towards establishing a minimum bar of competence, more for my future employers' benefit than my own.
You don't need after-the-fact curving for that, though.
When I set (free-form written, math/CS) exams, I always made a point of designing the exam in a way where I didn't really expect anybody to get more than 90% of the points. I also made sure that students knew this.
I always set grade brackets before grading (e.g., 80% of points gets you an A, below 35% is a failing grade, and so on). I always ended up with a pretty reasonable grade distribution.
they allow very good professors to give real mindfuck exam questions that cause you to walk away from the test with a new perspective on the material
I think the problem with this is, although cool, very few professors are capable of doing this well and very few students benefit from it. IOW, it doesn't scale.
To my mind, oral finals or 'discussions" would repair the cheating issues quite well. But again, it's hard to scale and professors would need to be trained in how to do them.
I took a class that gave mindfuck questions and did not need curved grading.
It was simple. The weekly assignments contained 6 questions. One of those was the mindfuck question and wasn’t graded (if you solved it you got extra credit, but hadn’t been solved so far).
You don’t even need to hide the crazy questions. Offering them as extra credit is a simple solution that works well.
Those exams were often the most edifying couple hours of the whole semester. You also got a clear sense of the difference between you and a real master of the material which is a helpful lesson in humility.
I went back to grad school recently and it seems like that mode of testing has gone out of style in the last ten years. The exams I took were geared more towards establishing a minimum bar of competence, more for my future employers' benefit than my own.