Normalization of student grades by class performance

Presented at Alberta Mathematics Dialogue - AMD, Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2024-05-03/04. Students at universities take many courses to graduate. At some universities, most often larger institutions, the student course grade performance is a function of their classmates. The course grades are awarded ”on a curve” adjusted to reflect an expected mean and standard deviation of the performance in the given class. Therefore, in such a case, the student’s grade very much depends on their classmate’s performance. Smaller institutions, Mount Royal University, might shy away from such grading on a curve and award student grades independent of the performance of their peers. Whatever the scenario for the grade assignment is, it is conceivable that students might be awarded harsher grades due to the high performance of their classmates. If the particular class had higher scores on average, and another class had lower scores on average, this process would normalize these scores based on how an individual student scored relative to the mean value of that class. We propose a method to produce adjusted student grades that would reflect their class performance and as a consequence, we could generate adjusted GPA based on the class performance of the student peers.