The famous 'Bell Curve'

D'you know what struck me the other day?

They supposedly select 'the best of the best' (ahem) students for medical school, right?

Then why does the bell curve appear again in terms of performance...surely we should all be on par...?

The obvious answer is that no matter what the distribution of marks - be it five between the top and bottom or be it fifty, a bell curve can still be drawn.

But forget the graph, then. In terms of speaking to people - we all have different attitudes towards the course, if not different marks. Some people are keen as hell (regardless of whether they need to be, obviously performance is a combination of hard work AND intelligence), and some aren't (once more, regardless of whether they need to be, though usually when they don't need to be).

If they're selecting the best of the best, the most dedicated, then why does that distribution appear every year? Do they have, like, a 'hard working' quota to fill, a 'party-hard-but-still-do-well' quota and a 'slacker' quota or something? They MUST do, given that it happens every year.

Either that or we, like, fall into place as that's, like, the natural order. This makes no sense, though. As apparently they pick the best of the best...

No idea. Perhaps there is an obvious answer. Falling into the latter category of the above three, though, it's not apparent to me...

More later x