> If your test will have an average score of 50, make that a B (or whatever), and perhaps 75 and A. Just do it and _fix_ it to those grades.
That's still a form of curving, since you can't know ahead of time on a new test how students will do. E.g. if you arbitrarily fixed it at 50 / 75 and your students do a lot worse than you expected, do you just fail the lot of them? If not, and you move the score thresholds lower, then that's just what curving is.
In fact, I had a couple of professors who told us ahead of time that curving could only be used to adjust our scores upward, but never downward, e.g. 70% was passing, but so was 60%, if enough of the class did poorly. Made the students feel much better, since they had a fixed bar to reach.
Seems like you'd be satisfied though if the curve used at least ~100 students to calculate so that it didn't change much due to random variation (e.g. if your class is small, aggregate multiple years of data)? Still a form of curving (since you are, at the end of the day, being compared to other students), just with different methodology.
That's still a form of curving, since you can't know ahead of time on a new test how students will do. E.g. if you arbitrarily fixed it at 50 / 75 and your students do a lot worse than you expected, do you just fail the lot of them? If not, and you move the score thresholds lower, then that's just what curving is.
In fact, I had a couple of professors who told us ahead of time that curving could only be used to adjust our scores upward, but never downward, e.g. 70% was passing, but so was 60%, if enough of the class did poorly. Made the students feel much better, since they had a fixed bar to reach.
Seems like you'd be satisfied though if the curve used at least ~100 students to calculate so that it didn't change much due to random variation (e.g. if your class is small, aggregate multiple years of data)? Still a form of curving (since you are, at the end of the day, being compared to other students), just with different methodology.