"... grades on _a_ curve."

[Joel S. Berson]

At 12/24/2013 10:39 PM, Jocelyn Limpert wrote:
>Grading on the curve existed in the '50s!

I agree.  But whether I heard "a", "the", or "the bell" I can't
swear.  But I certainly knew it was the bell curve, probably even
before I took a statistics course.

Joel

>On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 10:14 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> > Subject:      Re: "... grades on _a_ curve."
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > On Dec 24, 2013, at 10:04 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
> >
> > > I do not. My earliest recollection of this is early 1980s, so perhaps it
> > had become indefinite by then. I also don't recall it being on a bell
> > curve, just on some undefined curve.
> >
> > Ditto, back to at least the early 1970s.
> >
> > LH
> > >
> > > On Dec 24, 2013, at 6:56 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at ALUM.MIT.EDU> wrote:
> > >
> > >> Remember that bygone era when the expression was,
> > >>
> > >> "grade on _the_ [bell] curve"?
> > >
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