This means, if everyone does well, even if your exam scores are near perfect, you could still end up with just a pass grade.
It sucks for students, but this way, grade inflation just cannot happen.
I guess the moral here is do what challenges you and don't worry about anyone else.
Colleges here use both to determine scholarship eligibility, and it turns out I qualified for nothing. If I had taken the easier classes and raised my GPA to meet the threshold, I would have gotten a full ride based on my SAT.
The moral here is you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
But I do suppose that the person who is 'cheating' the system is more likely to get screwed harder than someone doing the 'right' thing in the case of a major change. I expect that if things were changed in a way that hurt people doing what they were supposed to, there would be some transitional period, grandfathering, etc to protect them, whereas if a change hurts people who are gaming the system, it's more likely to just leave them hanging, since they shouldn't have been doing that anyway.
The irony in all this is I ended enrolling in a science degree for which I only needed a very low mark to get into - I could have enrolled in any of my high school's subjects and it would not have mattered.
(As an aside, this is but one of the reasons internships/coops/externships are so important for undergrads.)
Problem is it sucks not only for students but everyone else (e.g. potential employers), too. If grades only show your relative position on a bell curve and not your absolute skill level, they cease to allow for skill level comparison between people. With bell curve grading an engineer with an C being born in a baby boomer year may be better than an engineer with an A graduating in a year with less students.
But cohort size changes (the number of babies born can differ substantially year over year), which impedes comparability.
Sure, both ends of the grading scale are easy to read when using bell curve grading. The problematic part is the center (where - by definition - the majority of graduates will be found): The C grade of year X could very well be better than the B grade of year Y.
Bell curve grading seems to be the worst of both worlds - the students experience even less correlation between effort and grade and you weaken inter-cohort comparability. If grading reform is willing to lose comparability between students anyway it should move in the opposite direction and grade relative performance improvements of individual students. That is proven to result in better overall performance of students (especially for weak performers).
The point is with scoring on a curve you can say that this person scored at this point in the curve so they are comparable to some one who achieved the same 20 years ago.
Intelligence pretty clearly has environmental influences and can change over time, even if the base value and/or maximum achievable level for a particular individual is genetically predetermined.
> The point is with scoring on a curve you can say that this person scored at this point in the curve so they are comparable to some one who achieved the same 20 years ago.
Comparable in terms of where they are in the distribution of people who were tested at the same time.
Not necessarily comparable in the actual skill that is being measured.
Which comparison is important depends on why you are comparing; there are times when you want the former kind of comparison, and times you want the latter. (If you keep both individual raw scores and group statistics, you can answer both questions appropriately, if you just grade on a curve and keep only the result of the curve, you cannot.)
Intelligence development certainly is both heavily dependent on environment and can change for a given individual if the environment changes.
A quite well designed study on this topic is the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study that shows that adopted children have an IQ more similar to their social parents than their biological parents. It further showed that earlier adoption (= more exposure to new environment) meant higher correlation.
Whats more important however is the fact that IQ as measured is not a very good indicator for future performance. Motivation, especially achievement motivation has been shown to be at least as important for a successful professional life. And achievement motivation has been shown to improve strongly when grading based on individual performance improvement, e.g. measuring the relative performance gains (see e.g. Rheinberg & Krug, 1999).
But as it can be shown that the environment strongly influences IQ I'd say it is safe to assume that we as a species haven't yet approached the biological ceiling of our cognitive abilities. Once the environment doesn't influence IQ test results anymore, though...
This may seem counter-intuitive, but there can be huge differences between classes and/or years. Same teacher, same material, seemingly similar students and widely varying results. Ask teachers and they'll confirm this appreciation. And this grading system completely ignores the fact...
I am assuming there are entrance exams as well.