Why not use percentile instead? It's fair. It's clearly the best way to compare students within a class or within a school. (I've heard India has been doing

Why not use percentile instead? It's fair. It's clearly the best way to compare students within a class or within a school. (I've heard India has been doing this for years.) If you then insist on normalizing the percentiles across schools and eras, have the students also take a standardized final exam (like GRE, but specific to each course). You don't have to test every course, just the ones that teach fundamentals. This should be more than sufficient to make schools (and percentiles) comparable. This is comparable to the british first/second/third-class system. It'd also do wonders for pressuring schools to up their game. It's be mighty embarrassing if a tony private school scored substantially lower on their standard tests than a moo U. It could also validate MOOCs and other alternative forms of instruction.