Grading on the curve

I've completed the 'speaking test' for two out of the three grades here in middle school, and will complete the remaining grade tomorrow.

As we were giving feedback to the completed grades, I once again realised just how futile my efforts to educate are, given the following:

Points scored in main test Points Awarded Points scored in speaking test Points Awarded

16 - 20 20 6 - 7 10

13 - 15 19 4 - 5  9

10 - 12 18 2 - 3  8

 7 -  9 17 0 - 1  7

 0 - 6 16

From this it can be seen that a student who has scored 0 on both tests will still have 23 out of a possible 30 points! If this is how the English grading works, I'm pretty sure that the other subjects follow suit.

Why, oh why, should anyone try to learn in such circumstances? Those students who love learning for its own sake are the 30 out of 30 students, but for how long can they remain motivated by that? They end up expending their efforts on the subjects they love, and blow off the rest since they will pass anyway!

And, even worse, the attitude to a test being meaningless carries over until they are then confronted with one that does, and then the stress sets in and we have students killing themselves because of the failure they were set up for.