One of my high school teachers used an accumulating curve just for this reason - a number of pre-written tests were rotated out pretty randomly and your grade was scaled in relation to everyone who had ever taken the test. It did fail to account for anomalies like the teacher discussing a subject particularly poorly one year but it was pretty fair feeling.

Some of my high school professors treated cheating differently depending on the type of the cheat sheet used: handwritten ones would get ignored, but printed one would be punished.

You would think you would ignore outliers when bell-curving.

"Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%"

> "Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%"

Years later, police discovered evidence Sally replaced Timmy’s grandma’s insulin bottle contents with glucose in order to pass that test.

Even worse, sounds like a perverse incentive to kill Timmy's grandma.

That's how I've always seen bell curving. In Quebec, to get into something like medicine they look at your z-rating, which if how far ahead of the bell curve you are... so at best it selects for people who pick easy classes and at worst for people who actively sabotage other students. To me it always sounded like a great way to end up with psychopaths as doctors.