If the exam scores are not resulting in the grades you want, then what do you do? Turn them into new scores!
My AP CS teacher used 10 × √(score), which always felt fine; it basically gave you a letter grade bump (and made it hard to fail) while feeling mathematical. I think he was my only high school teacher who ever curved a grade.
But the best solution is to build extra credit into the scoring system and then refuse to curve at all.
My vector calculus professor always had 110 points available on exams. They were hard exams, but if you had time, you could solve an extra problem or two to make up for mistakes. (Or if you were my friend Amanda 👋 , you’d just solve them all and get 108% or so on every test.)
My Geography of Wines professor (yes) had 1200 points available throughout the semester with grades out of 1000. Miss an assignment? Make-ups were already in the syllabus. Put in extra work, earn extra points. That class was also delightfully challenging.
Bad Curves
My Physics II professor used some awful T-score mechanism and you never knew what was going to happen. I hated it, except that it was a giant class, so I didn’t have to work very hard on the exams to get curved to an A.
My Microelectronics I professor fit exam grades to a bell curve with a mean of 75. Only professor I ever had who would lower a grade to force the class to a perfect Gaussian. I loved that class, but it was weird in many ways. (Among other things, the textbook was only half of the full book, so the index referred to pages that didn’t exist in the physical object you were reading.)
