In eucation, grading on a bell curve (or simply known as curving) is a method of assigning grades designed to yield a desired distribution of grades among the students in a class. Strictly speaking, grading "on a bell curve" refers to the assigning of grades according to the frequency distribution known as the Normal distribution (also called the Gaussian distribution), whose graphical representation is referred to as the Normal curve or the bell curve. Because bell curve grading assigns grades to students based on their relative performance in comparison to classmates' performance, the term "bell curve grading" came, by extension, to be more loosely applied to any method of assigning grades that makes use of comparison between students' performances, though this type of grading does not necessarily actually make use of any frequency distribution such as the bell-shaped Normal distribution.