> Do you really benefit from knowing which of two Harvard grads got a few extra questions right in a handful of exams?

It isn't just "a few extra questions", when professors makes tests harder they add more interesting questions that requires you to think further rather than just plug-n-chug. The difference between a 4.0 student and a 3.0 student at lets say Caltech is enormous, so yeah I care.

If you wanna make questions challenge students to think harder, by all means do so.

If you do, and an entire classroom of kids manages to answer them correctly, "I guess I have to still give some of you Bs and Cs" isn't a great response.

But that is how it works at other prestigious universities, basically every professor thinks that students doesn't learn stuff well enough and would want to test even more thorough understanding than they already do. It isn't about grading on a curve, it is about giving a good test for the students.

It isn't like students at any institution understands the material as well as the professor even when they get the highest grade in that class, but that is the goal. The better the students the closer you can get, Harvard just refuses to test that properly, or if they do test it they don't record that grade.

Why would you want "interesting problems that require you to think further" to be on exams?! That should be the entire point of lectures, office-hours, group problem solving, etc...

Because they test if students understand the material well enough to apply it to nonstandard problems. A person who can solve nonstandard problems is much more valuable than a person who can just solve standard problems.

Curious. I always assumed the primary purpose of an exam was to demonstrate proficiency, not mastery -- especially for undergraduate coursework. If you want mastery, you look at other work product: Projects, research, letters of recommendation, etc.

Pedantry and intellectual hazing seem endemic in academia -- from the perspective of someone who spent entirely too many years in the sector (all the way through postdoc).

Practicing to solve tons of standard problems is a waste of time, it doesn't help you grow much, which is why having interesting problems on exams is way better since it gives students a better goal to aim towards. It also gives a fairer view of each students understanding, since students tend to forget everything they crammed to pass the standard questions.

> Pedantry and intellectual hazing seem endemic in academia

I wouldn't call interesting test questions pedantry or intellectual hazing. Giving tons of basic easy questions is pedantry and intellectual hazing to me, I'd rather just have the harder questions.

Exams designed to have a 60% median score with subsequent curve adjustment are (a) wildly common in elite colleges, and (b) certainly classify as hazing in my book.

For people pursuing personal growth rather than a starry transcript, challenging tests are more like "lifting to failure" or "grinding the boss on hard mode" than hazing.

But on the other hand, yeah, for fragile egos and given the very high stakes associated with one's transcript, not everyone is there to get good and it can absolutely be devastating to never ace tests like you did in earlier years.

Different programs/eductators may have more sympathy for one group than the other, but there's no viciousness involved.

This is pretty common in education, at least in the teacher circles I've known. I know in Germany, they talk about the "Anforderungsbereiche", or requirement levels, where the first level is being able to repeat facts, do calculations, etc; the second level is understanding when you apply those facts or formulas; and the third level is understanding why those formulas work, or being able to escalate why some knowledge is relevant to a subject.

I would understand the third level (possibly even the second level) as including that ability to apply knowledge in nonstandard contexts that the previous poster was talking about - being able to see not just how to perform a calculation, and how to use it in a given context, but also how to create that context when necessary - seeing that the question on how humans move in groups could be modelled as a fluid dynamics problem, for example.

The general wisdom amongst teachers is that most exams should be able to differentiate between these three levels of understanding, so you want questions where the student can just follow the line and do the right thing, but also questions where they're being asked to apply knowledge in different contexts, prove why something is true, or explain why some fact is valuable or relevant in a given context. This isn't about grading on a curve, it's about differentiating between how far different students have come in their understanding. (And the corollary if that differentiation is that if all the students have the same understanding, it's likely that the course wasn't challenging enough, and many of the more advanced students could have been pushed more.)

That said, these regions are more about assessment in general than specific written exams, and the third level will be easier to test in some exam formats than others - a multiple choice exam leaves little opportunity to demonstrate that understanding, whereas an oral exam allows the examiner to explore the subject a bit more deeply. I studied in the UK where a single end-of-unit written exam is mostly the norm, and so these exams had to test all the different levels of knowledge, but if you're gathering results over the course of a year or semester, that might look differently.

> They got into Harvard

Harvard admits quite a few people who would normally not qualify as the cream of the crop. Above average, even good - but the worst Harvard admit is probably on par with the smartest kid at the local community college. They might bring other things to campus! But that doesn't mean you want them handling your legal defense or managing your money.

> and were subsequently successful there.

If 80% of the grades at Harvard are As, this just means you're not in the bottom 20%. I would also generally assume that this 80% is not uniform - some classes or even majors will give out higher percentages of As than others.