All exams should be designed with a passing grade somewhere around the 25%-30% mark, with students having acceptable mastery getting around 50%. Note: the tests should be harder, I'm not talking about simply taking current tests and dropping the pass threshold.

It doesn't make sense that we use more than half of the grade scale on failing grades. It doesn't matter if you get a 50 or a 15, you're still getting an F in the class. Instead, we should use the bulk of the scale to distinguish different levels of mastery. We only use 25% of the scale to distinguish "just ok" from "amazing" when we could use as much as 50% or more.