If the purpose of a system is what it does, what is the purpose of this education system that seems to uniformly and spectacularly fail to educate children?

It's not supposed to be a competition, but there should be incentives and oversight and controls and all the features you'd want to be able to reward outliers and foster excellence and all the good things while minimizing the bad.

What we have is tragic and absurd.

I think the intent is to calibrate for instruction quality

When I was grading labs as a TA, the intent was communicated to me rather as "per university teaching guidelines we mustn't have too many students get the top grade but we also mustn't have too many students fail"

Reminds me of "stack ranking" in performance reviews.

The purpose of normalized grades is to habituate future workers to this so that by the time they find it in the real world they don't resist.

It's part of reproducing the labor-captial relationship.

It also helps to avoid populist teachers that give everyone a A+++ to avoid students complains, and also idiots that give everyone a C because only God is A and only the teacher is B.

(We don't use that method here, we use other method to try to avoid both problems.)

Where is the incentive for test makers in academia to accommodate this outcome? It sounds nice but I don’t think jaded professors or overworked, inexperienced, and stressed TAs have a reason to do this. It sounds nice but it doesn’t actually seem connected.