We were told in lectures. It's a University-wide policy you can read about here:
http://sydney.edu.au/policies/showdoc.aspx?recnum=PDOC2012/267&RendNum=0
From my reading of it, it seems like they're changing from a model where you are scaled against the performance of your cohort to a model where they set a specific standard for each grade and you're marked against that standard. So it would be possible (I guess) that if every one did horrendously throughout the semester, they might not give out any HD's. Full compliance isn't expected till the end of 2013 but I'm not sure what that means for assessments this semester.
Thanks for the link.
When I read it though, it doesn't seem much different to what is always done. In that there are always faculty standards of what is a D, C, or P grade (very general, but found in the beginning of unit outline), and a lecturer normally does mark to that standard, and lecturers do compare marking if different people are marking same cohort; but at the end of that whole process, if there are too many HDs (for example in law, there can be no more than 10%, then they would have to scale some of those marks down to a D grade). To be fair, I have just given it a quick read through, and I haven't compared it to the old policy to really see the differences, so I may have missed a lot of the significant bits!
I don't know about other faculties, but in law, there is a minimum of 3% HDs and 10% Ds, I would think it would be very difficult for a subject to give less than that even if bell curving isn't required - it would be hard to justify that a cohort was that much worse than another. The other impact is that a subject could give out all Ds and HDs. But I'm pretty sure the reason the Law bell curve was introduced was to get around the large number of good marks being given out!
rather than the other way around. I suspect the law students would be quite happy to go back to a non-bell curve system (there was a lot of complaints against the bell curve when it was formally introduced a couple of years ago).
Actually the law distributions are:
Passing grades in undergraduate and JD units shall conform to the following distribution:
4.1 No more than 40% of the students may receive a grade of D or above.
4.2 The range of HD grades must be between 3-10% of the total number of students.
4.3 A minimum of 10% D grades must be awarded.
Edit: And here is a section of Law's reasons as to the moderation of grades:
"The standardisation policy also aims not only to ensure an appropriate degree of fairness and consistency in marking across a particular year, but from year-to-year, to ensure relative stability in the level of marks awarded, and to maintain the integrity of the marks given and to avert “grade inflation” and its consequent impact on the award of honours and ranking on graduation."
