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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. She is currently on leave.
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Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero � all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.
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Curveball

By Megan McArdle

Oct 4 2007, 12:59 PM ET Comment

This Volokh Conspiracy thread on a student suing over a curved "C" set me wondering: why are curves so common, anyway? Both my schools graded on a curve, which arguably served as a check against grade inflation--but are the incentives for grade inflation really so great that it couldn't be held back by a general agreement among the faculty that a "C" is average?

Moreover, the curve isn't merely for overall performance; it's done on each exam. In some classes, a 55% on an exam can be an A. But why do faculty, particularly at the undergraduate level where the task is mastery of a basic body of knowlege, set exams where the majority of the students can't answer a majority of the questions? Or, conversely, as I've also seen happen, where the difference between an A and a C is a few points, because everyone scored in the high 90's? Is figuring out what your students are likely to know really so hard for an experienced teacher?

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