Professors, Quizzes, and Textbooks

I must say, having a heavily curved class does nothing to foster love for humanity. Actually, it encourages me to wish disaster and calamity on others so that the bar falls low enough to trip over it and land mostly unscathed. Never before has a 45 been acceptable in my life, but as I've learned, a 45 is awesome when the class average is hovering around a 40. For those unfamiliar, that circumstance would probably earn the grade of a B. It's an interesting system, and it's the reason engineers have a GPA but still. 

But onto other more specific situations in which I will weakly attempt to shroud details and protect identities. One of my science classes has an interesting testing procedure. As I've already said, it's curved but not as one might expect. It's completely curved. You're ranked 1-400 ish and the top 20% get A's, next 30% get B's, and so on. There are 15 multiple choice questions, which is a generous term. Personally, I don't call things with the option "answer not here" as multiple choice. The difference between that kind of multiple choice and short answer is the time it takes to grade each. And the cover sheet makes me laugh every time. It states:

You have 50 minutes to complete 15 questions. Each correct answer is worth 5 points. Wrong answers earn 0 points.

Well, I realize I'm probably the crazy one, but that originally sounded to me like wrong answers can't hurt you. I realized within two seconds, however, that this group just enjoys being convoluted. Why think of tests as starting at 100 and then lowering in grade as the student misses questions? No! That's no good at all. Everyone begins at nil and earns his/her way up to greatness. 

Okay, fine, in general I like the idea of this, but dammit it all equates to the same thing, so why the hell are we arguing? It's amusing because it overtly puts the onus on students for low grades without actually being any different than any other grading system. It's just like how all US History books put the raping of South America in the passive tense as if leaving out the subject (aka, us) makes any difference to what happened or the fact that we did it. Actually, textbook PC makes me die a little inside every time I see it. For example, American Pageant, you are quite wrong in refusing to use the word "slavery." Your reasoning? It has a negative connotation. No shit it has a negative connotation; it's supposed to! Calling slavery "coercive labor" is akin to referring to Jewish ghettos in the 30's and 40's as "restricted community development programs." Teenagers are forced to do chores; that's coercive labor. Slavery was not that, and trying to dress up, obscure, or rename it does nothing but perpetuate lies and misunderstanding.