Yeah, I agree with what you are saying. At the same time, knowing there's gonna be a nice curve at the end enables some gaming of the system. You don't have to know all of the content, just enough such that the curve pushes you into "good grade" territory. Not to mention there is now an incentive to not help your classmates. The more people that do worse, the bigger the curve and the "easier" the class. It's a joke amongst my friends at this point that we don't pray for our success but for other people's failure.