There’s a strange combination of facts in teaching:
Fact #1: You have virtually infinite flexibility in writing an exam. You can make it as hard as diamond or as soft as chalk. You can offer copious partial credit or none at all. You can ask questions identical to the homework, or questions of baffling novelty. You can give the exam in-class, as a take-home, open-book, closed-book, group-style, or as an Instagram post on which students comment their answers and your score is the number of likes you accumulate.
Fact #2: Whatever the resulting exam, 90% means A, 80% means B, and 70% means C.
These two facts are the parents of an ancient and venerable custom in education: the curve. If the exam scores are not resulting in the grades you want, then what do you do? Turn them into new scores!
In that spirit, I give you…
(To answer a common question from Instagram: this only makes sense if you read the grades as percentages. Example: 60 is actually 60% = 0.6, which gets curved to 0.6^0.7, or roughly 70%.)
(Again, we’re reading these grades as percentages. And the sin(x) function takes them as radians, not degrees.)
