Here is a story of something that happened to a friend of mine. This is from New Zealand.
He was taking 7th form Latin. Latin has enough students in the 3rd form but by the time you get to 7th form (The final year before university) there were only 20 or so students in the entire country taking the course. He was taking the course by correspondence because the school obviously wouldn't provide a teacher for a single student.
He scored 95% in the final exam. In NZ the end of year standardized tests are scaled to fit a curve across the entire country. He was scaled down to 43%. A failing grade.
Obviously in this case the only students that would bother taking Latin all the way up to 7th form are going to people who care enough about it to learn it well. The standard scaling method used doesn't make sense at all with this group of students.
He wrote a letter to the education minister of NZ complaining about this issue. Months later he got back a form letter explaining why test scores are scaled with no regard to the special circumstances.
Curving only makes sense when there's a normal distribution. Sounds like, at that point, the students were no longer in a normal distribution and therefore curving failed.
No it means the exam was way too easy. 90% of the questions were giveaways. If its ok to fail 400 out of 1000 students doing English, then its ok to fail 4 out of 10 doing Latin. Once you adjust for the easiness of the exam, he actually did not do too well.
Are you trolling? With a subject like Latin, the actual situation is that all the students are really good by the time you have only 20 students left in the whole country. The exam is probably not easy at all, and someone who didn't prepare well would get a much worse score.
You are assuming that it makes sense to make grading to a curve with a sample that is highly selective. It does not.
(I did not study Latin. Just as an item of curiosity, my country's public radio service YLE broadcasts regular radio news in Latin. You can listen and also read some of the stuff here: http://ohjelmaopas.yle.fi/1-1931339 )
You try to fit the marks to a normal distribution. It assumes that all classes/courses have the same distribution, with the same midpoint and that the only variation is that the test was too easy.
So, (simplistically) if the expected midpoint is 75, and everyone is in the 95-100 range, a grade of 97.5 would be shifted down to 75.
It does penalize students for having really smart friends and getting together to take a difficult course.
He was taking 7th form Latin. Latin has enough students in the 3rd form but by the time you get to 7th form (The final year before university) there were only 20 or so students in the entire country taking the course. He was taking the course by correspondence because the school obviously wouldn't provide a teacher for a single student.
He scored 95% in the final exam. In NZ the end of year standardized tests are scaled to fit a curve across the entire country. He was scaled down to 43%. A failing grade.
Obviously in this case the only students that would bother taking Latin all the way up to 7th form are going to people who care enough about it to learn it well. The standard scaling method used doesn't make sense at all with this group of students.
He wrote a letter to the education minister of NZ complaining about this issue. Months later he got back a form letter explaining why test scores are scaled with no regard to the special circumstances.