I think that curves discourage cooperation and encourage zero-sum thinking. Curves are only really necessary when the professor is out of touch with the class and/or prerequisites.
I don't think that people would typically go to the lengths of trying to sabotage someone else, in practice it could just look like a bunch of people working separately and not cooperating at all
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any curves and the coursework would be tailored sufficiently for every cohort of students for every semester
I've always loved curved classes because they allow very good professors to give real mindfuck exam questions that cause you to walk away from the test with a new perspective on the material.
Those exams were often the most edifying couple hours of the whole semester. You also got a clear sense of the difference between you and a real master of the material which is a helpful lesson in humility.
I went back to grad school recently and it seems like that mode of testing has gone out of style in the last ten years. The exams I took were geared more towards establishing a minimum bar of competence, more for my future employers' benefit than my own.
You don't need after-the-fact curving for that, though.
When I set (free-form written, math/CS) exams, I always made a point of designing the exam in a way where I didn't really expect anybody to get more than 90% of the points. I also made sure that students knew this.
I always set grade brackets before grading (e.g., 80% of points gets you an A, below 35% is a failing grade, and so on). I always ended up with a pretty reasonable grade distribution.
they allow very good professors to give real mindfuck exam questions that cause you to walk away from the test with a new perspective on the material
I think the problem with this is, although cool, very few professors are capable of doing this well and very few students benefit from it. IOW, it doesn't scale.
To my mind, oral finals or 'discussions" would repair the cheating issues quite well. But again, it's hard to scale and professors would need to be trained in how to do them.
I took a class that gave mindfuck questions and did not need curved grading.
It was simple. The weekly assignments contained 6 questions. One of those was the mindfuck question and wasn’t graded (if you solved it you got extra credit, but hadn’t been solved so far).
You don’t even need to hide the crazy questions. Offering them as extra credit is a simple solution that works well.
I think of helping each other as part of the reason we put students in the same room to begin with. So when a student asks another for help with understanding a concept and the other refuses that request, that's working against the purposes of group education, i.e. sabotage.
But I admit I might be a bit radical here compared to most people. (Who I am sure will argue that utilising teacher time to the maximum is the only reason to gather students in one room.)
I agree with you, but also most of the time when people ask each other for help it isn't to help understand a concept. It's usually for source code.
In the class I mentioned above, the prof and TAs weren't pissed off about people using each other to understand concepts or even high level design. They were pissed because people were copying source code verbatim, comments and custom debug messages and all
On a related note, if someone ever asked me for help with a concept or high level design I would be more than happy to oblige. But (most of the time) people aren't asking for that, they want source code that they didn't contribute to
this could be fixed by making assignments collaborative, but then the professor has no means of verifying where everyone is in terms of understanding
I don't think that people would typically go to the lengths of trying to sabotage someone else, in practice it could just look like a bunch of people working separately and not cooperating at all
In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any curves and the coursework would be tailored sufficiently for every cohort of students for every semester