Are those exams a contest? Like, they will only take the best N percentiles? Because if not, you’re competing only against yourself and should ignore others’ grades

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ewild 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's an incredibly privileged Pov to say it isn't a contest. These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.

	▲	wrs 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, not once the scores become meaningless because everyone assumes they cheated.
	▲	ndriscoll 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ivy League kids tend to not be facing some extreme economic precarity. In fact a decent number of them likely have enough family wealth to not need to work a day in their lives. The others are unlikely to face too much trouble over a few Bs at Brown.

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anigbrowl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes they are, that's what 'graded on a curve' means. It's common in the US to give students a percentile or Z-score or T-score rather than the raw score for the examination. This was a source of massive frustration to me when I first encountered because I had no way of self-reviewing my exam performance to guess which questions I might have gotten wrong.

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none2585 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I did not go to an Ivy League but many of my classes at an alright school were graded on a curve and so C was average, B/D was one standard deviation above/below, and A/F was two.

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em-bee 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

if they are graded on a curve then they are competing against each other.

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1270018080 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Are those exams a contest?

Yes