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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

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

Well, not once the scores become meaningless because everyone assumes they cheated.

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.

I’m literally asking. I haven’t said it’s not a contest

> These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores.

Has that changed since I was in school? After I got my degree, not a single person or entity in the workforce ever asked for my grades. They just wanted to see the degree.

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.

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.

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

> Are those exams a contest?

Yes

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