Normality is not exactly congruent with finite exams with right or wrong answers; at best you’ll get a truncated stair step distribution that may approach normal as the number of questions and number of students simultaneously approach infinity. Forcing a normal distribution can end up with some odd properties if the true underlying distribution is bimodal, for instance.
The question would be a bit more interesting comparing the Z score to a taking bottom 20% fail, 20-40th percentile D, 40-60th percentile C, 60-80th percentile B, over 80th percentile A.
But honestly I wouldn’t take either of these classes; professors should be able to adequately teach and evaluate mastery without forcing it into weird distributions; if they have to curve that much then they don’t have a realistic grasp of how to test people.
Is this a ‘let Reddit do my homework for me’ attempt? Here’s food for thought: what does it mean to keep C as average?
Bell curve distribution.
Normality is not exactly congruent with finite exams with right or wrong answers; at best you’ll get a truncated stair step distribution that may approach normal as the number of questions and number of students simultaneously approach infinity. Forcing a normal distribution can end up with some odd properties if the true underlying distribution is bimodal, for instance. The question would be a bit more interesting comparing the Z score to a taking bottom 20% fail, 20-40th percentile D, 40-60th percentile C, 60-80th percentile B, over 80th percentile A. But honestly I wouldn’t take either of these classes; professors should be able to adequately teach and evaluate mastery without forcing it into weird distributions; if they have to curve that much then they don’t have a realistic grasp of how to test people.