Mark wrote...
Is there a mechanized way to take a series of grades and bump them up
or
down to fit a forced distribution, eg. no more than 10% get A's, 30%
B's etc...

I've never understood the logic behind grading on a curve. If the test
is fair, then if, say, 1/4 of students taking it score 90%, shouldn't
all of them get As? Likewise, if more than 1/2 score below 50%,
shouldn't those fail?

Now if there were some methaphysical fairness involved, to wit, the
teacher would be fired if s/he needed to skew the scores consistently
up or down, then curves would be OK.

As a pure thought experiment, if the top 10% of scores should get As,
then with the named range Scores containing the scores and x one of
those scores, the grade for x would be given by

=LOOKUP(PERCENTRANK(Scores,x),{0;0.3;0.6;0.9},{"D" ;"C";"B";"A"})

This won't give precise cutoffs if there are any ties for the scores at
the 90th, 60th, etc. percentiles. Scores at such thresholds would get
the lower grade. If you want them to receive the higher grade, use the
formula

=LOOKUP(COUNTIF(Scores,"<="&x)/COUNT(Scores),{0;0.3;0.6;0.9},
{"D";"C";"B";"A"})


--
hgrove
------------------------------------------------------------------------
hgrove's Profile: http://www.excelforum.com/member.php...o&userid=11432
View this thread: http://www.excelforum.com/showthread...hreadid=274627