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I don't understand why grad exams are graded on a normalized scale. Why do they want some people to fail every semester? (That grading structure sounds set up to fail some students.)

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It eventually degrades into game theory where you're trying to predict how your classmates are going to answer the questions. If you play it too safe and only answer questions you are 100% confident in, you might not get a lot of marks. But you won't lose any marks either. If you friends play it more dangerously and answer questions they are 70% confident in, they could either get all those wrong (boosting your mark) or get them all right (lowering your mark).

On the one hand it's fascating. Yet on the other, it's absolutely terrifying.

You're explaining a student's response to the exam structure, but you're not explaining why the institution wants to fail some students every year.

If you care about student learning, you do a criterion-referenced assessment. If you want to compare students to each other, you do a norm-referenced assessment. Why is a grad institution more interested in comparing students to each other than in assessing whether people learned what they were supposed to learn?

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