I've been doing a lot of paper grading (busy work from one of my teachers that keeps canceling my lessons - profuse apologies and thanks abound) lately from my third year students, and I've been noticing a trend. While I haven't actually plotted them out, I'm rather certain the grades in class follow a bell curve fairly closely... a reverse bell curve. Especially at the third year level, I think this is the result of Japan's competitive academic nature as one approaches high school. The kids who feel like they still have a chance work hard. Everyone else just gives up.

It's not simply a matter of more As and Fs than Bs and Ds than Cs, either. Given the following grading scale for a 30-question, fill-in-the-blank test,
A: 25-30
B: 20-24
C: 15-19
D: 10-14
E (yes, you read that right): 0-9,
In a class of 40 I have about 10 As, 15 Es, and the other 15 are spread pretty evenly. Given a normal 10% scale, I'd have about 6 As, 4 B to D, and the rest failing. More interesting than all of this is that even among the As, almost all of them are a perfect score, or merely have deductions for spelling or a forgotten preposition. On the bottom end, in the E range a class has maybe 5 scores that aren't zero.

PS