I agree with you, Bostonian. I also agree with Val and cricket, though. This is sort of the way that I structured things when I taught, Bostonian. I had the oddest way of determining the point total of anyone I've ever known-- I took the top score achieved on each assignment and made that "100%" on that assignment. Beyond that, I had no curve. This meant that there was good incentive for student's to collaborate with one another, and that I could (hypothetically) give the entire class A's. Never happened, of course, and I did have to give out F's, but not many.
I'd add to Val's statement about exam structure by saying that there is also a means of structuring homework so that it is a more meaningful assessment rather than just mechanistic practice.
My homework sets were created de novo in all of my classes, so there was no way to "game" those any more than the (every-Friday, open-notes) quizzes or the exams. They were supposed to be difficult so as to make the students think and apply what they were learning through short quizzes and in-class examples that I'd leave open-ended (I posted solutions immediately after class. So a bit of the same idea that Val was using for homework-- those quizzes and examples counted for very little grade-wise.
Homework sets had no other restrictions than that they HAD to be in the student's own handwriting. Students could work together on them, but they quickly learned that they had better be doing at least some of the work themselves, or at the very least, had better be UNDERSTANDING that work.
I awarded "partial credit" for partially correct answers on homework, tests, and quizzes, but the catch was that the student had to have shown work that I could decipher. Their choice, in other words.
This system is a LOT of work for a teacher, but it results in rock solid grade distributions, ultimately. ONLY the students with excellent mastery earn A's, and only those without it wind up not passing the class.
It also helped students who had test anxiety or other issues with performance, and it encouraged the formation of "learning communities" outside of class time.
To be clear, these were college students, however.
