1) Much more challenging exams
2) The realization that "getting everything right" is not really how any part of the real world works.
I think this variance is fine, depending on the course. It is reasonable for a foreign language course to expect a 100% on an exam, if they are testing and teaching to some particular guideline, for instance. It is also reasonable to push the limits in something like a physics course, to test both "can you regurgitate", "did you understand", and "no, really, did you really really understand"?
Most people are there for credentials, and one of those key credentials is the GPA. If taking a certain course set at one school gets you a degree considered equivalent at another, but the other school has a department head who likes "50% is average" then you end up with one student with a 3.5 and one with a 4.0 when both are equally qualified.
The one who went to the stringent school doesn't get the job. And there is very little information on what classes what what schools (and in particular, what professors) are going to give you A's for effort or D's for genius.
So, for example, a 98-100% might mean "top student in the class that year", a 55% might mean "lowest scoring student who deserved to pass the class", and 75% might mean "right on the average that year". (YMMV, these numbers are illustrative and different colleges and programs will have their own conventions).
The "actual" or unadjusted scores might be quite different with no curve - for example, in the freshman calculus class I took, correctly answering 4 problems out of 10 on the exam was enough to earn a grade among the top few students of the year and a curved grade in the 90s, even if the "raw" score might be something like 35-37%.
So there we go.
To me, this completely negates the point of having 100 marks to choose from.
If I'm out to be a doctor or an astronaut or an engineer, I'm likely going to question my ability to accomplish these if I'm made to feel that I've missed a bunch of knowledge on the tests. Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?). Perhaps it's an American thing, but the fear of failure made me double check and re-study things for the better. I might've been more lazy if I had grown up with the rationale that "oh well, you can't get everything right", but perhaps there's more culture that plays into that.
When I get 90% or above on a test, I like the validation that I'm successfully learning near to the pace and complexity challenges set out by the instructor. I really don't like the idea of someone aiming to keep those results lower for exclusivity or other reasons.
I'd also be curious where the increased challenge comes from.
- Are the questions longer and require more steps?
- Do they require a leap in logic to 'discover' something while you're contemplating the question?
- Is it a huge amount of recollection?
- Any combination of the above?
Having an understanding that you don't know everything is a pretty important thing to learn.
And that's the best thing you can do, and learn to do!
> Those, and many others, are careers that ought to get everything right because of the consequences
You don't get everything right by believing that you "ought to" and rigging the game so that it looks like you do. You get everything right by always assuming the worst, double-checking everything and analyzing mistakes with the goal of making them impossible in the future, rather than finding someone to blame.
> (they don't, of course, but why is college teaching this lesson?)
Because it cannot be taught too early.
Indeed; that's the bias I was referring to in my comment above (I'm from the UK and I think, in this particular aspect at least, our system works better).