As Northwestern students get their midterm grades back, many are learning the pluses and minuses of being graded on a curve.

“The curve at NU stimulates a cut-throat environment which challenges many and hurts others,” said Neal Taparia, a Weinberg sophomore.

Melissa Buenger, an Education sophomore, said she thinks grading depends on the professor and the subject — the curve made her biology classes harder — but overall the system keeps grade inflation down.

“In general I feel that there are more schools with grade inflation than NU,” she said. “Grade inflation is when everyone gets As. Not everyone gets As here.”

When grading a class on a curve, most professors give students a number representing their overall performance in the course. As the grades come in, students are arranged from top to bottom according to their score.

Then the instructor decides where to draw the line. A large class would be graded with a straight curve, with the average score between B and B-. In smaller classes the instructor decides which grade to assign to the mean depending on the students’ overall performance.

McCormick sophomore Lilai Gebremedhin said the curve results in better grades.

“If they didn’t curve it,” Gebremedhin said, “everybody would get Cs and Ds.”

But Kavisa Cyprian, also a McCormick sophomore, said she disagreed.

“I think teachers in Tech make the test harder knowing they are going to curve it later,” she said. “I think the teachers should just make the test so they won’t have to curve it later and maybe it will make Tech less stressful.”

Economics Lecturer Mark Witte said when he grades a class, he orders the midterm scores and gives a B- to the score of the middle student.

“For the first midterm,” Witte said, “I usually make that the lowest B- and by the final the highest B- because people drop and it makes it easier to get a higher grade.”

Witte’s grading system divides the class into 13 parts. Two parts get an A, two parts get a B and two parts get a C. The rest go to the plus and minus grades. In the end, Witte noted, a student with a 70 in the class could get an A.

“Students fixate on numbers like it means so much,” he said. “The mean or the median represent what the average student does in class. So numbers are immaterial.”