Are you in a highly competitive program? I looked into it a little and it seems that some schools do this in order to ensure that a number of students are guarantee to fail. Usually this is mandated by the school and not the teacher. Even then, the teachers typically make their tests hard enough that the grades would be improved no matter the effort placed into them.


Grading on a bell curve is inherently unfair also. Typical distribution of student scores fall in two humps. One hump is high and includes students that put in a lot of effort, turned in their assignments, did their homework and studied. The other hump includes students that did not try. Depending on how difficult the course was, the second hump will be closer or further away. There will be outliers, of course, but usually a large % of students will fall within those two humps.