unsw-maths-guru
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I don't think that this is quite right. What I think happens is that they sometimes have allocated a mark for something that almost no-one does, like explicitly stating that something has satisfied all the hypotheses of some theorem. That mark would be useless at telling apart the good students from the bad, so they sometimes move it to somewhere where some students were giving much better anwers than others but were getting the same mark. So I don't think this has to do with piling high marks on easy questions and low marks on hard ones, but just in putting the marks in places where you can distinguish the good students from the not so good ones.I have heard from a few people that the marks each question is worth is not determined prior to the exam. Apparently, if a lot of people get a particular part of a question correct, it is given a high mark value. Also, if only a few people get a particular part correct, it is given a relatively low mark value (given the difficulty of the question). It seems very counterintuitive.
btw, it is possible to see your final exam if you really want to. Don't know how hard it is. Probably lots of forms to fill in or something.