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Ahh1) I never went into an exam feeling like I knew material because the exams are designed to be very tricky. So after a lot of curved exams, I studied a lot less than I should have bc “well it’s gunna get curved anyways.” Also I never felt good about leaving curved exams. Like I never feel relieved or happy to be done with it. I come away from an exam wondering how I did comparatively to others, and constantly worrying that I did worse than my peers.
2) Even if you get above the curve on one exam, how much better you do depends on the standard deviation. Same goes for bad scores. So even if you did way better than the mean, you won’t get a big grade boost unless you were like super stellar, as in 2+ SD’s above the mean
3) Generally, and this just might’ve been my undergrad culture, but it encouraged people to be less collaborative in orgo and whatnot because if you studied harder, you would theoretically do better than your friends and then get better grades, which would in turn improve your grade more.
So it bit me in the ass in several ways, lol
See, my undergrad only curved things if we did spectacularly worse than previous years. So the curves were helpful for keeping us in line with other years. That’s why I couldn’t see why curves never helped you