A new philosophy for when to curve exams?

Especially for large lecture classes, it can be common for examinations to be graded on some sort of curve. The goal of this practice is to assure that the overall exam scores remain consistent between semesters, in particular statistics such as the mean and the standard deviation are kept in place. The problem with this is procedure that it is almost robotic in nature. Even if things are kept uniform in some sense, it only takes the scores of the students into account. If there is one thing I learned about designing exams in my mathematical reasoning course this semester, it’s that…