One method of applying a curve uses these three steps: First, numeric scores (or possibly scores on a sufficiently fine-grained ordinal scale) are assigned to the students. The actual values are unimportant as long as the ordering of the scores corresponds to the ordering of how good the students are. In the second step these scores are converted to percentiles (or some other system of quantiles). Finally, the percentile values are transformed to grades according to a division of the percentile scale into intervals, where the interval width of each grade indicates the desired relative frequency for that grade.