Georgetown's McDonough School of Business normally has a mandatory curve, which I strongly oppose. When I started at MSB, the curve was set to 3.33 for most classes, with a few finance and accounting classes set to 3.00. A few years ago, we raised the curve to a max mean of 3.5. All the arguments presented for raising the curve were actually arguments in favor of eliminating it, but thanks to anchoring and adjustment bias, our conservative faculty (conservative in the sense of not wanting to make big changes) simply raised the curve a bit.
However, during the pandemic, we suspended the curve, in part to boost student morale.
This allowed me to experiment over the past two semesters with teaching-to-mastery. The idea behind teaching-to-mastery is that you do not use grades to rank and sort students. Instead, you use them to certify the value of their final work. Further--and this is the crucial part--you allow students to revise their work over and over until the get it right.
I told students over the summer and at the beginning of class that I want all of them to get As. I will not be lowering my normal standards. However, I will clearly communicate with them ahead of time what I expect from them. I will also allow them to revise their work as often as they want until they are satisfied with the grade they finally receive. I told them there will be no formal limit on how often they resubmit work, but that informally, they should be sure that the work is substantially improved, and that they should observe a norm of trying not to waste my time or theirs. I also advised them that if they pass in work early, there will be more time for revisions.
Now, I was somewhat worried about doing this. After all, I have seven or so books under contract, plus a bunch of papers due for various anthologies, plus papers I'm writing aimed at journal publication. I am teaching three courses this semester, the most I've ever taught at once. (Last year I only taught two courses, so I owe the university an extra course this year. My teaching load is 9 credits/year.) I don't have teaching assistants to help grade.
At any rate, I didn't find the grading too difficult or time-consuming. Partly that's because I grade quickly. I don't nitpick every detail on student work; I instead give them 3-5 big comments or questions. (Ed psych says this is best for students, fortuitously for us.)
Note also that we do lots of group work at MSB, so that cuts down on grading pretty dramatically too. (Why group work? Because we want them to encounter and overcome the logistical problems group work presents. That's part of the pre-professional training. The stuff that makes group work suck is in this case a feature, not a bug.)
The most important finding was that this seems to have created a culture of revision in my classes. I expected students who didn't receive As or A-s to revise their work for the purpose of getting a better grade. But, to my surprise, even students who get As have been revising their work pretty consistently. I might grade a project or report and say, "This is an A, but here's how it could be better." Over the past month, nevertheless, students have been resubmitting work that already got an A, saying, "Though this won't affect my/our grades, but we wanted to fix the paper anyway."
It's possible we will decide to permanently remove the curve. We'll revisit that in the Fall. I hope we do. Right now, most of my students will get As. I have not lowered my standards. Rather, I'm just giving students opportunities to learn and improve so that they meet them. In the past, we were perversely incentivized to ensure that a decent number of students fell beneath our standards, and we could not allow them to fix their mistakes by revising their work, because that would upset the curve. While that might be useful for ranking them by raw talent, it is not useful for helping them learn.