78 Marc Malone
” You refute yourself when you say you had required studies in essentially useless courses (ethnic studies). You were very fortunate that you had one with an actual teacher. If both were a waste, perhaps you’d be echoing this article.
As for this curve thing, I’m not sure how it works. When I was in school, I ruined the curve, but one could not ever get more than 100%. My thought is that it doesn’t dumb down the curriculum, but rather, allows the dregs to remain in the class.
Since your name is spelled correctly (Geoff, rather than Jeff), I suspect your parents had much to do with your success.
Finally, you’d have more credibillity, if you actually used PARAGRAPHS! Geez. 
”
I was not attempting to deny the reality of forcing ______ studies on students whose field of study has nothing to do with _______ studies, rather, I was disagreeing with the author’s suggestion that anyone but a _______ studies major would be forced to take a year’s worth of ______ studies classes. There is exaggeration with the purpose of making a rhetorical statement about something, and there is exaggeration with the purpose of engaging in demagoguery, and I believe the author is guilty of the latter.
In my experience, there were two types of curves: those which took the class average of an exam, and added x amount of points to each exam as would be necessary to reach the average score that the school wanted(typically 70% or 75%). The second type(which I only experienced in organic chemistry) was to write a very difficult exam to challenge the students(he said that he tried to write them so the top score was 80%), and then taking the top score as 100% and normalize the rest of the class to this score. Needless to say, it was a tough course, but for that very reason I found it one of the more rewarding during my studies.
My parents certainly had a lot to do with my success, but to be honest, the primary cause was being genetically gifted. I’ll be the first to admit that I could be a better student, I picked up a lot of bad habits during grade school(ah, the wonderful quality of public schools), and came to rely more on natural talent than hard work, which is not a recipe for long term success. I do take pride in the fact that I was able to do as well as I did in college, as I was struggling with alcoholism that had begun in high school for the first 2.5 years of my studies prior top getting sober, I was lucky in this regard.
Finally, while I’ll admit that math has always been a greater strength than English, my paragraph breaks aren’t that bad, are they? Haha.
