>Her school has to meet certain percentage-based "standards"

I went to a top-5 public high school in my state. "Standards" are so ridiculously low it's hilarious. I'm pretty sure you could still exceed the state standard for 12th grade reading with the reading level most of us (upper middle class, white, college-educated parents, high property taxes) had in 5th grade. Meeting standards certainly didn't mean you were even remotely qualified to go to college, and is orders of magnitude below the aptitude required to get into good colleges. So when I hear about districts where just reaching the standards is a stretch, it's shocking just how enormous the gulf in education quality in this country really is.

IMO this is a great argument to stop controlling schools at such a hyper-local level. There's no good reason for K12 education to vary geographically. The education that the professional world will expect of a kid in Chicago is the same as what it will expect from a kid in small-town Alabama or rural North Carolina. Why do we accept the argument that K12 education should be up to the community? Why is preparing workers for a global economy considered a local problem?

Because it's disgusting just how better-prepared I am than the children in your friend's school district. I didn't earn parents who can afford to live in an expensive community, I didn't earn the ability to take AP classes from talented teachers, I didn't earn a calculus teacher who refuses the school-provided textbooks in favor of illicit PDFs from a curriculum being drafted by one of her colleagues, I didn't earn a veteran teacher and former DuPont research scientist to get me a 5 in AP Chem. All our STEM AP programs get 4s and 5s save for a small handful of slackers; the teachers calm us down when we're getting nervous by reminding us that we're being graded on a curve alongside kids from the middle of nowhere. The opportunties we had that other communities don't is just staggering.

Wait... How on earth do they justify redefining 50% as 75% ? (or whatever the actual numbers are)

Because if they don't they get defunded.

sounded like teachers were scaling performance to meet standards instead of adjusting teaching quality

It's called grading on a curve, and it's (imo, unfortunately) very common in undergraduate courses in the US :)

I understand grading on a curve. This is not that.

What we're talking about here is remapping a fraction (what the student scored) to a higher-than-equivalent percentage (what the "standard" requires).

it was used by many of my math & science classes here in canada, and i'm unsure why it is a problem?

The prof would make the test very hard so the average was around 50-70 and then use a curve to get grades.

Curve grading is just conceptually silly. If a test does indeed cover the material, then answering correctly half of it should lead to a 50%, no more, no less.

If curve grading is required because the test doesn't properly assess what the students have been working on, that means the test was bad in the first place.

In my first semester (I think, might have been second) honors calculus class, the (great) teacher got carried away on one midterm. I got something like 40%, and that was the second highest grade in the class, the average was more like 30%. He was so disappointed we didn't do better on that exam...

My undergrad professor in electrical engineering asked us to calculate voltage on a diode as part A of a problem. This came out as 0.7V. The part B was to convert this to percentage! (Don't ask me how and why the answer was 70%).