At ICO we have practicles, which I presume everyone has. You perform the procedures/techniques that you learned that quarter and a prof. observes and grades you by checking off on a list of points. Then the course coordinator equalizes the scores across all the profs. That means if prof X had and average grade of 83 pts and prof Y had 87 pts, the scores would be equalized to 85 pts. Therefore, some students have their grade raised while other get it lowered. I think this past quarter they may have changed that so no ones score was lowered, just the low scores were raised. Last year a lot of students were pretty angry when their score was lowered.