Hey John,

Thanks for the comment – I hadn’t heard of gist before, it is perfect for this. I used the image because pasting lost the indents and I didn’t have time to fix it, but your solution is better!

I was surprised initially too, but the more I think about it, the more I think that all of the random variables involved make it hard NOT to look like this. Increasing/decreasing the difficulty of the task will scale it horizontally. The type of task does too – I purposely asked two things that would require more than just a quick calculation.

It would be interesting to pose this to students and ask them to choose a task that would skew the curve in a given way.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff embedded in this – glad to have happened upon it!