Curves are the lesser evil. There are professors who dont give good grades at all. If you select a curse run by them cant get more than a grade C. Meanwhile there are other professors where everyone gets an A easily.

Most students will probably pick the easy professors who give only As - because for them the degree is just a ticket for the job.

In fact those "tough" professors can have an adverse effect on those who picked the harder route. If you dont get good grades, you will have a lower GPA and that dream company will not even invite you for an interview. Some automated HR system will reject your application. They dont care that you went to a professor who taught you a lot -> they only see the low grade.

Same for scholarships - tough professor makes it already difficult to have good grades, but if you are graded without a curve, you get bad grade -> and can lose your scholarship.

Nobody cares about you as a person, or your knowledge, they measure you by your grades.

This is a tragedy of the commons in some ways: professors are supposed to give good grades, otherwise students wont choose them. Those who want to know more, are punished for it - in multiple way (first of all, they need to study more, but then they get a lower grade, which means lower GPA, what can lead to worse job offers, no scholarships etc).

If you want to be a "popular" professor, just pass everyone?

On a side note, in those great universities, dont they pass everyone anyway? I think frontpage had an article some time ago, that when you get to Ivy League, you will get a B or C even if you are bad, they generally dont kick out students who try to study, but arent particularly good.

Curves wouldnt be needed if every course had an objective list of material that should be learned - but even this is difficult - and not comparable between professors on same university, not to mention different ones - despite standards and various efforts (not to mention measuring if students really can know the whole list)

How is sharing knowledge "violating academic integrity"? Unless given specific and explicit instructions not to reveal working solutions, then sharing your code is literally just "helping" others, it's up to them to either study it and produce their own versions, or jut blatantly copy & cheat.

Because each university has university-wide rules forbidding sharing assignment solutions. It is explicitly forbidden even before starting the course unless the syllabus or professor directs you so. You can't "help" others on their own assignments by giving your solution. You can't receive direct "help" either.

Edit: here's the text of my alma mater: Any behavior of individual students by which they make it impossible or attempt to make it impossible to make a correct judgment about the knowledge, insight and/or skills of themselves or of other students, in whole or in part, is considered an irregularity that may give rise to an adjusted sanction.

A special form of such irregularity is plagiarism, i.e. the copying without adequate source reference of the work (ideas, texts, structures, designs, images, plans, codes, ...) of others or of previous work of one's own, in an identical manner. or in slightly modified form.

[https://www.kuleuven.be/onderwijs/oer/2021/?faculteit=500004... translated with Google]

In my time in college I helped a lot of fellow students work through a lot of assignments. I sat down with them and helped them to think through the problem and find examples to learn from that weren't full solutions to the assignment. I helped them find difficult bugs in their implementation by pointing them in the right direction or showing them debugging tricks I found helpful.

What I didn't do was show them my implementation or even talk about how I solved it. Yeah, doing it the long way takes a bit more effort, but the result is that the students I helped actually understood the code they submitted and were better equipped to solve the next assignment without help.