>"Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world." After 3+ years of univ

>"Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world." After 3+ years of university, this has felt like a form of doublethink on the part of some professors and almost all administrators when it comes to grades and grade deflation. On one hand, you hear that "students shouldn't worry so much about the grade" and "what you learned is more important than what grade you got". On the other, more realistic side of things, they've contributed towards and support a nearly one dimensional system of graduate and professional schools where a high GPA is almost everything for acceptance. Top med schools and graduate schools almost entirely accept students with A or A- GPAs, regardless of the student's other relevant experiences or accomplishments, and often regardless of the quality or rigor of the student's undergraduate institution. Therefore for any student at an elite university with the (honestly modest) goal of becoming a doctor, anything less than an A- (on a curve with the brightest students in the country, no less) is a failure because the same faculty and administrators pushing this kind of study lock them out of achieving their goals for it. Faculty and administrators in education have created an elaborate hoop jumping game of achieving impossibly high and fairly meaningless scores, and then get angry when students (a) are alienated by something they used to enjoy and (b) decide to play the game! The same professors who have the audacity to feel insulted when students merely ask if certain content will be on the test or how final grades will be distributed then turn around and tell students that their B+ average will hugely limit them from achieving their goals when in an advisory role. This is why I'm a huge fan of grade inflation- truth is, university grades are a poor metric of future performance, and generally only serve to creatively restrict, alienate, and limit students at the college level. Grade inflation largely eliminates the fairly useless choking pressures of the grading system.