Bless you for clearing up the bellcurve. There's been so many qns about it clogging this sub and the askers usually sound like they have no idea what its supposed to be. I think I wrote an analogy for how bell curve is supposed to work on another post but I'll rewrite it here for those who don't get math language.

Lets narrow our sample to 5 students A B C D E with A being the best at acads and E the worst.

Ideally the paper will be set at a level such that the marks they get will ve 80 70 60 50 40 respectively for example so there is separation and everyone can get a different grade.

After all exams don't exist to give everyone A1. Before you say they should, let me just point out that if everyone gets A1, no one does. Think about it.

It's like a participation certificate at that point with 0 value. The whole purpose of exams is to separate people. The problem with exam culture is not that not everyone gets A1, but rather how many people think not getting A1 is a massive tragedy. Tbh I think all the recent attempts in trying to lessen competitiveness by rounding up or idk is useless but enough social commentary...

Easy paper: A B C D E might get 98 99 96 97 93. The bellcurve is supposed to separate them so what we mean by easy papers disadvantaging the ones on top is that careless mistakes may be penalised much more heavily, and those who never study can do much better on an easy paper.

Hard paper: 75 65 40 15 10 Usually those who score on the lower end have weak foundation or cannot tackle hard questions. But it doesn't make sense to give C the same geade as D and E. Especially when you increase population and realise that A LOT of people did really badly. So the bellcurve "gives" C a decent grade (eg B) even though 40 is def not a B mark.

But yeah hope this very layman way of putting things helps some of y'all. Its not whether you hit a certain mark but where u stand amongst your peers. So in that sense u kinda deserve the mark you get no matter what. But yeah if you messed up and know you underperformed then you can only hope a lot of people did bad too (not pray to the mystical bellcurve gods).

I hope y'all can consider the purpose of exams before y'all blame random things for your misery. The problem is often not with exams but rather sg culture surrounding them. And there's not much we can do about that (other than stop caring so much. you cant change the past nor accurately predict your grades stop dwelling on it.)