ethics - Is it normal/ethical for student grades to be assigned according to quotas?

In my undergraduate Physics courses, I have heard from my Professor last semester that he got in trouble from the physics department for passing too many students.

This semester, the TA in the lab portion of my class (who grades our lab reports) came flapping around a memo he got, also from the Physics department, stating that the average grade needed to be 75% and he will now be grading accordingly, after a few weeks of normal grading.

I typically spend up to 4-5 hours on these reports, typing up formulas and doing analysis, calculations, etc. I have gotten a 100 on every lab report in my first semester and up to that point in the second. Now, after the ultimatum, I'm losing points for things I didn't before, and being asked for additional analysis that has never been required. I already spend as much time as I can, and this harsh grading feels out of nowhere and undeserved.

Questions:

1. 
   

   Is this normal that teachers have quotas?

   
   
   


2. 
   

   Should it affect students who actually put in the work?

   
   


3. 
   

   Does this seem like an ethical issue of arbitrary grading that I should bring up to the department or my professor?

   
   

Answer

Yes, this is (unfortunately) fairly normal in the sense that it is done at a number of locations.

The places I've heard it done, the main concern is at a department level, with courses of many sections, in which instructor difficulty has high variability; some instructors are "hard" and others "easy". Admittedly, this causes some initial level of unfairness in the luck of the draw as regards who each student gets for an instructor. The fixed-statistic doctrine forces the harsh instructors to scale up grades to look more like other sections, and so forth (this reduces student complaints to the dean/department). The resulting counter-unfairness is that if lots of legitimately strong students all get in the same section at once, they will be effectively penalized... however this becomes somewhat masked because the grade-data is now mangled, and all you have left are subjective student complaints that are likely ignored. I know that I've had multiple sections of the same course in a semester, taught identically, with wildly varying outcomes (40% passing in one section and 80% in the other).

I think the gold-standard way of handling this would be to have joint tests that are team-graded (i.e., same one or two professors grading each problem and verifying each others' judgement). However, that is logistically expensive and rarely done by tenured academics, I think.

My father had a similar down-grading in a college class, for similar reasons, circa 1966 and he hasn't stopped complaining about it yet.