A lot of professors are overworked with classes and programs too. One of my girlfriends uas a professor for anatomy who teaches two full college courses before going to her massage school to teach anatomy. She says you can tell that the professor isn't really there mentally. Sge never actually prepares for the courses she's supposed to be teaching, but you can tell us just from exhaustion. I wonder how many are like that and just forget what coursework they're currently preparing for others.

On the first point I agree. In my country, 40-50% is a pass usually and that seems crazy for its own reasons. But a curve can make that worse just as easily as it can make it better. The education system I work in is now introducing the idea that not only do you need to hit 50% to pass, you also have to show a competency with every learning outcome on the curriculum. We'll see how it goes. My subject areas haven't been hit yet.

The second point is essentially what I said, it's a cop out for a teacher who is bad at setting exams. Easily fixed by some QA and/or collaboration. At least run it by a TA. Also they should read the curriculum before writing an assessment.

Add to this that exams need to be different each year to prevent cheating and you can easily get a few bad questions.

I had this one teacher in university (not yet a PhD but was working on it) that I ended up taking like 4 different classes from in university. Although he was brilliant and experienced having worked in the industry for 30 years or so, and was naturally a very good teacher and very passionate about what he taught, it's a simple fact was he was new, but he was very humble and transparent about that. The first course I took from him was only his second time teaching that course (or any course), and the other three were each his first. All these courses he built the curriculum himself. Again, he's an excellent teacher, one of the best I ever had, but he was still working out the kinks in his tests. He was being very transparent with us students about his process of choosing to award partial or full credit for questions and problems he decided weren't fair, or were worded ambiguously, always taking feedback during class after getting our graded tests back.

I had a few other courses like that too, and I feel like that system (decreasing the weight of problems that aren't fair to students) is generally a better system than simply grading on a curve. The former is more granular, differentiating poor grades due to lack of study from poor grades to a faulty test. It also provides a clear direction for improving the curriculum next semester. Grading on a curve often feels like a copout to avoid the labor involved in improving the curriculum. BUT on the other hand, if the class really went so poorly that nobody understood the material or if the test was almost totally unfair, then imo grading on a curve could be the fairest solution for the students. There's no perfect solution there, the students time is already wasted, better to give them the benefit of the doubt in that case.