"It's very obvious what I mean. If math teachers are biased in that they cut the more mathematically advanced students a break while the already "mathematically compromised" are held to a different, much higher standard, there is an obvious problem."
Your point really wasn't obvious at all. You wrote: "most math teachers I've ever known play the "favorites" card quite often. Probably because 99% of the students loath math and hate their courses." Huh? Should math teachers favor students who make it clear through their performance that they HATE math? Everyone KNOWS that teachers value hard work more than laziness, so really, truly, I do not get your point there, unless you are stating what everyone already knows. Of course math teachers are going to devise a system that screens out apathetic students. Why wouldn't they?
Once you hit the calc though, more "math geek" types start to crop up. Can't have the tiny fraction of persons that might go into highly math related professions get a less than stellar grade!
Do you really think that math teachers are that impressed by calc students? Do you think the number of math geeks IN a calc class is significant, or even muc of an increase over college algebra? Ask any math major--calculus is baby talk among math people. It's mainly taken by pre-meds, engineering students, econ types, and others who will have almost no future in math, and couldn't care less about the subject. Real math geeks often do as little calculus as they can get away with. If profs want to court the rare future mathematician, a calc class full of annoying grade grubbers is hardly the place they'd try to do it. Whatever their reasons for grading the way they do, I doubt a great bias in favor of the average calc student is one of them.
This has absolutely no relevance to grading scale discrepancies between calc and pre-calc/algebra.
I mentioned when I said that I worked with algebra students that college algebra is a weed out course. It purposely has a relatively high percentage of raw points required for each grade, because math departments only WANT a certain number of algebra students to go on to calculus, for many reasons. One of them is work ethic and enthusiasm for math. I've seen plenty of college algebra tests, and I've seen just as many calculus tests, and in my experience, the tests in college algebra DO give the students a comparatively larger number of "breaks." So if they're not getting 93% or whatever, there may be a lack of effort involved. And math departments have deemed effort to be something they value. Since I've personally witnessed the great variation that exists among algebra students in terms of their interest and effort (and the lesser variation among calc students), I think it is relevant for me to point this out when I say that I think the system is fair.
And even at your school, it's entirely possible that, relative to the material, the tests are intentionally made easier in algebra than in calculus. How would a syllabus tell you anything about the difficulty of the tests? The difficulty of the material is not the same thing.
Have you taken college algebra and calculus at your school? You said you taught yourself calc out of a book, so I assume the answer is no. Then how can you be so sure that the calculus exams are NOT harder at your school? If you aren't familiar with the difficulty of the tests in all these classes, then how can you judge whether a particular grading scheme is fair or not?
Finally, what do you mean by a "curve?" In your original post I think you said that 93% was the cutoff for an A in algebra. Are you saying that a student with 93% of the total possible points gets an A? (I assumed you were because of the freebee points you mentioned). If so--that's not really a "curve," it's just a grading scheme. A curve would mean that the top 7% of the students got A's.
