By: Gowri Sunil

News Editor

Tests are meant to assess an individual’s knowledge, and the resulting grades should reflect that. But when tests are curved, grades reflect the knowledge of others, too. Curving a test refers to adjusting a student’s scores based on the overall group’s performance to account for a test’s difficulty. While the goal of this is to make grading more fair and have a lower fail rate in difficult classes, a test curved under unequal conditions actually does otherwise. Teachers should curve tests by period, ensuring a level playing field for students while avoiding peer pressure and toxic competition.

Across all periods of a class, a curved test compares students who took the same test under different circumstances. As per LGHS’s class schedule, a student from third period would take a test a whole day earlier than one in fourth period This often leads the later period to benefit from leaked warnings and tips about the actual test, which violates the school’s academic integrity policy’s ban on sharing test content. 

Sam Mollin, who majored in political science at the John Hopkins University, pointed out in the Johns Hopkins University News-Letter, “It doesn’t matter if you successfully learned 95 percent of the material if 50 percent of your class successfully learned 96 percent. Rather than earning the A you deserve on a test, a bell curve could downgrade you to a C.” While not all tests in high schools follow the bell curve, Mollin’s points still apply to various forms of curved grading. Schools cannot control every variable, like a student’s memorization skills or prior knowledge of a subject, but they can control timing and access to material. Curving by period eliminates this variable, ensuring students receive grades reflecting fair conditions.  

Curving tests across all class periods also puts students against one another as it encourages them to stop helping their peers, even to simply clarify a topic. The fear of their help leading their peers to score better on a test and subsequently break the curve creates a toxic social dynamic rooted against collaboration. Larry Elkin, a financial expert and author, labeled curved tests as, “a zero-sum game” and explained: “Every student’s advancement on the grading score must be offset by another student’s regression,” adding that, “resulting grades wouldn’t tell us as much about the individual’s skills, at least not without knowing the context in which they were awarded.” This dynamic worsens when curving across all class periods. Later periods feel pressured to obtain confidential information from earlier classes to keep up with the overall curve. Simultaneously, students in earlier classes feel guilt-tripped into giving hints for fear of being labeled as selfish by their peers. Curving tests by period would enable students to retain the boost under fair circumstances while avoiding these competitive tensions. As a result, a healthier social dynamic replaces a toxic one, additionally removing the fear of compromising one’s own grades. 

Curving tests by period is a necessity in rigorous classes to allow a student room for improvement. When it comes to curving tests, separating scores by class period is the fairest approach since the same preparation and in-class instruction applies to each group’s scores. If we want to reduce stress and maintain fairness in education, curving by period is essential. 

(Sources: John Hopkins News-Letter, Palisades Hudson)