>> Surely the obvious solution would be to award the top grade (A or A* or
>> 1 or 10 or whatever) to the top 5% of those taking the exam. But then
>> these are the same people who are vigorously against performance related
>> pay.
>
> The problem with distributing grades along a bell curve, like that, is
> that in years where the class is full of genies, someone who has an
> otherwise good grasp of the theory ends up with a C, and years when the
> class is full of morons, you give an A to someone who doesn't merit one.

Agreed if only a small number of people are taking the exam, a handful 
of geniuses could well upset the balance. However for national exams 
like the GCSEs in the UK there are 700k people taking them, having a 
fixed distribution is surely much fairer than trying to ensure the 
standard of questions is the same each year (whilst trying to not make 
them too similar to previous questions).

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