The debate about grades goes on. Here is an interesting and one honest approach to grades covered in the NYT article A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean.
The key point is that UNC Chappel Hill has decided to publish the median grade for all students in a class along with the grade the individual student achieved for the course in the transcript. They are also considering publishing the standard deviations. This is certainly an honest approach to grades that boldly declares" It is not so important what you learn in this course so long as you test better than your peers!" And, of course, there are absolutely times in life in which you want to know, out of these 30 or 300 people, who can score the highest on a teacher-made curriculum test. Maybe there is a popular upper level course with only a few seats or maybe you want to award departmental honors for your best performers.
Clearly it says nothing about who really learned the material. With curving, it is possible that no one really knows what any intelligent person would consider a bare minimum for the course content. In the land of the ignorant, the neophyte may be king! Or if the teacher has done a good job teaching, the students have done a good job learning and the test is designed to test the full range of knowledge, the entire class may have achieved a great deal, though someone ends up with a D.
It is often said that no one wants a doctor who got a D in med school. Actually, if you normalized grades and forced a curve at a C average, then most everyone in med school would have less than an A average and most everyone's doctor would be a C student or lower. Many Harvard and Standford med school graduates would have a D average. Does this mean they are substandard doctors? Absolutely not, assuming that Stanford and Harvard have the discipline and will to flunk out those who really do not meet minimum requirements and that they have the integrity to graduate those students who do meet the requirements needed to become a doctor and truly help people. We continually confuse mastering a subject with identifying who is best in the subject.
