That actually sounds kinda right. When people hear the phrase "above average" you probably interpret that to mean "noticeably better than most people" rather than "scored higher than the mean score".
It would depend on what the distribution of ability looked like, it's quite possible that over 50% of any given class have scores/ability that are grouped very closely together to make the differences in scores fairly trivial. Then you have an elite group that are effectively bunched around a significantly higher mean and also a struggling group noticeably at the bottom.
Being a few marks off a B will still make you a C student.
This was certainly my experience at college, there was the "smart group" (which I wasn't in) and then there was everyone else.
I'm sure there is a better way of describing this with statistical terminology.
It would depend on what the distribution of ability looked like, it's quite possible that over 50% of any given class have scores/ability that are grouped very closely together to make the differences in scores fairly trivial. Then you have an elite group that are effectively bunched around a significantly higher mean and also a struggling group noticeably at the bottom. Being a few marks off a B will still make you a C student.
This was certainly my experience at college, there was the "smart group" (which I wasn't in) and then there was everyone else.
I'm sure there is a better way of describing this with statistical terminology.