Will There Be A Curve?

“Professor, are you going to curve the final grade?” I ask, my voice trembles as I surrender my second midterm exam. The professor does not even flinch. He smirks, opens his laptop, and hands me the spreadsheet. “Actually, I want you to do it,” he says. “Please use a bell curve to normalize all the scores and curve your grades accordingly.” I wake up in a cold sweat. It was a nightmare. And what the hell is a bell curve?

Welcome to the Economics department at Georgetown University in Qatar, where 40% of the student population identifies as “aspiring economists,” handled by a remarkably patient group of seven faculty members. If you have never experienced intellectual whiplash, I recommend eavesdropping on conversations in the atrium. It is not uncommon to hear a student confidently state, “Supply is demand,” and then proudly walk out with an A-. We are a department fueled by caffeine and a collective delusion.  

Statistically speaking, if you throw a stone in the GU-Q atrium, you are either going to hit a loud freshman with imposter syndrome or an Econ major with a cognitive delusion—or both, if you are lucky. Our academic existence is a cycle of copying Chegg solutions, complaining that the lecture slides make no sense while proudly never opening the textbook, and pretending to understand graphs by squinting harder. The department’s official student-to-faculty ratio is 28:1. Unofficially, some professors describe it as “existentially overwhelming.”

Office hours are a battlefield. They are not really for understanding content. Instead, students show up like nervous accountants with elaborate spreadsheets and emotional blackmail. “If I get a 76 on the final, and my participation grade is a 9/10, and you drop the lowest quiz, can I still get an A?” they ask, while wiping away a tear. Concepts? Learning? Nah. We’re just simulating understanding with conditional formatting and sheer willpower.

But this culture of tactical grade-hustling did not materialize out of thin air. It has been cultivated, slowly, in the warm and AC-fested environment of GU-Q. The professors are some of the most brilliant, kind, and burned-out people you will ever meet. They are under immense pressure to keep students happy. And in a setting where student evaluations can be career-defining, the incentive to “dumb things down” is not just tempting, it is structural.

We have been trained to expect academic comfort. Classes are small. Professors learn our names, our dietary restrictions, and our general vibe by week two. They respond to emails at 3 a.m. and extend deadlines with a grace that borders the supernatural. Assignments come with rubrics, rubrics come with samples, and the samples come with annotations. If something is confusing, it must be the professor’s fault (not the fact that we skimmed chapter nine while also binge-watching “Suits.”) This environment creates somewhat of an academic Stockholm Syndrome. We believe we are thriving because we are constantly reassured that we are smart, capable, and on the right track. The result is a classroom culture where “Will there be a curve?” is asked more often than “Why does this equation hold true?”

But then... we go to Main Campus. And everything…everything… changes.

In D.C., the intimate seminars are replaced by lecture halls that are as big as some international airports. The professors do not know your name, nor do they care to. The syllabus is a contract, the PowerPoints are scrollable novels, and if you email them past 5 p.m., their auto-reply tells you to talk to your TA (whose name you also do not know).

The transition is jarring. Suddenly, your Doha confidence collapses. You look around and see students who seem sharper, faster and more sure of themselves. They speak in a language you thought you understood, “statistical modeling” and “heteroskedasticity.” Those words flow naturally, with no hesitation or fear. You start to shrink. The self-assurance you carried from Qatar, built on two years of straight As and encouraging professors, dissolves under the weight of raised eyebrows. You begin to wonder if you have been preparing for the wrong exam this whole time. But in a few months, something else becomes clear. Behind the polished vocabulary and quickfire responses, everyone is struggling too. Everyone is wrestling with the same imposter syndrome, just wearing it differently. The panic is silent, shared, and often masked behind a well-timed “interesting point” during discussions.

And yet, when we come back to Qatar, it is all hero arcs and redemption narratives. “It was so intellectually stimulating,” we say, over a cup of Karak and under the false security of curved finals. We repackage our trauma into TED Talk-worthy reflections. “There was this one class where the professor did not even look at us.” The stories get recycled in personal statements and internship interviews. We are the survivors returning from an academic war. We are both traumatized and smug. It almost feels like we just took those classes to collect buzzwords we can now sprinkle onto our resumes.

Back at GU-Q, the ecosystem resets. Group chats of 15 people are revived. The classrooms fill again, but the spark is dimmer. We sit in familiar seats, next to familiar faces, but a little more alone. The semester rolls on. Midterms arrive. People rediscover their anxiety and the fruit basket at the Wellness. Someone inevitably sends a long, well-worded email to a professor asking why a 67 is not an A. The professor replies: “See syllabus.”

And so, the culture continues. Professors quietly suffer, knowing that no matter how much they try to elevate the standards, the curve will be demanded like a human right. We, in turn, keep floating on this inflated GPA cloud, thinking we have conquered the world when. In reality, we are just very good at surviving a system that refuses to let us fail.

Somewhere, deep in the night, another Econ major jolts awake. Cold sweat. Racing heart. She whispers the same question that haunts us all: “Will there be a curve?”