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[quote=Anonymous]Re grade inflation.  It's important to think about who and what grades are for.  On one level, grades are a way of giving students feedback on how well they've mastered the material.  At the same time, they give the teacher feedback on how well s/he has taught the material.  On this theory, low grades don't necessarily mean high standards -- they can mean that the material hasn't been presented in a way that most students can master -- e.g. too much too fast, inadequate background, poor teaching, or badly conceived assessments.  So it's time to review, re-teach, re-learn the material and/or make sure subsequent lessons/evaluations give students more practice in the areas where they are weak.

On another level, grades are used to rank and sort students for purposes outside of the particular class -- e.g. employment, admissions.

Often the two objectives are out of sync -- especially when cohort and curriculum vary wildly across schools whose students will be competing against each other for subsequent opportunities, which is why we see all the crazy new weighting formulas for GPAs, as well as why standardized tests are in the mix.  It's also why universities that devote a lot of resources to admissions accumulate HS-specific data (or impressions) of their own re how kids with a GPA of X from school Y typically perform as undergrads in our college.

Re grade inflation at a place like Harvard.  Arguably, two things are going on.  One is that, over the past few decades

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