Hahahaha... not in the US, no way. Course-wide averages for many of the classes I taught were 85-90. The idea of a 'C' being an acceptable grade is out of the question nowadays.
Some of this probably has to do with internal requirements. For example, if you say that a student needs a 75 or better to count this course as a prereq for the next course, then do you really want half the students to have to retake the course every time? Some of this also has to do with societal expectations of getting As and Bs.
I can say, however, that the idea that a 75 is the class average is definitely not true at most US colleges.
If 75 is a failing grade, then perhaps the average is merely shifted where you are compared to me. The thrust of my comment wasn't the precise value for the average, but that deviations from this average would be detected and reprimanded. Would you say this is accurate? Would you receive notice from administration is the average was found to be, say, 95%?
This is admittedly a more likely explanation for harvard's higher grades then the one I offered.
75 isn't failing, it is a "C", however it is a typical cutoff for using a course as a prerequisite for some other course.
<60 is failing. Very few students actually fail courses.
In general, in my experience, grades for the courses weren't a symmetric normal distribution with a mean of 75, like it is thought. The mean is more like 83, and it was skewed toward higher grades.
To answer your final question, no, I don't think the administration would care if your class average was 95%, quite the opposite. I had one professor in my undergrad who was more "old-school" - challenging coursework, no spoon-feeding, your grade was your grade and that was that. He'd regularly complain about visits from the "Center for Student Success" who complained that he was grading too harshly and fought (on behalf of specific students who went to them with complaints) for higher grades. According to my classmates, they were actually able to get their grades overriden at some level higher than he could view from his system.
> The average mark is generally fixed at around 75%
You just made that up.
> So a professor that systematically inflates grades will be called out.
Yyyyyyyeaaaahh...where?
From experience, the average mark given to Harvard humanities undergraduates is an A regardless of quality. Students literally cry in the middle of class if they get an A- because they can't string together a coherent argument from evidence.
> Perhaps universities like harvard have lower standards.
Believe me, I'll be first in line to shame their academic standards. However...
> In any case, consider that this system is in fact a solution to the proposed problem.
It might. I think that it creates other sinister problems in the process. You have to ask whether you think that the purpose of going to school is to better yourself versus competing against your neighbors. If a person does poorly in class because of someone else's performance, that's pretty fucked up. Likewise, if someone does well in class because of someone else's performance, that's also fucked up. The system you appear to be describing perversely encourages sabotage and cheating, because learning is secondary to "winning", because you're fucked by other people succeeding. My intuition is that systems that treat grades like a competition produce a combination of accidental failures and assholes who treat other people poorly.
>the purpose of going to school is to better yourself versus competing against your neighbors
It must be both. In order to better yourself, you must challenge yourself. Your peers have similar capabilities to you, because you both met roughly the same standard in order to get into the school you got into, as opposed to a better or worse one. Competing with them will therefore be challenging, but not too challenging.
Note that I don't propose the average is set at precisely 75%, nor that professors change the weights after the fact to make it so. Just that when they are setting the course - choosing what material to cover, what to leave out, setting the exam - they bear in mind the aptitudes of their students and choose appropriately. If the grades come in too high, meaning the students found it too easy, they might in future terms increase the pace or the difficulty of questions to compensate. This means that as a student you aren't competing with your class, but rather with the body of students that came before. In turn, you gain nothing from doing poorly, because you will still be awarded a proportionately low grade, and only make the course easier for future students.
Why this isn't implemented at the schools you attended I could only guess, but perhaps these schools historically determined standard based on more objective criteria, and have ceased doing so more recently without replacing their system for determining standards.
The reasoning provided here is exactly why we often explicitly told students that they were not graded on a normal distribution. I was told that, historically, when students were graded on a normal distribution, it typically led to bimodal distributions of grades - a few students continued to try, but most were convinced that if they all did poorly then they would all still do fine, and so they just tried to be "good enough" and chance it. By the time I was teaching it was simply departmental policy not to grade this way.
Even without this historical evidence, however, it does seem unfair to grade this way for exactly the reasons in BugsJustFindMe's response. It might make sense in larger first-year classes, but in the more advanced smaller classes (say, 30 students) it's likely that you're already down to a set of students who try really hard and potentially all deserve an A. There's a lot of correlation between (perceived) difficulty of the course material and the students who take the class, so there's no reason to expect that you have the same distribution of students from those beginning first-year courses in your "Advanced Stochastic Processes" course.
