I suspect this is a form of delayed gratification, which is to say the gratification of achievement or disappointment of failure is delayed or momentarily avoid

I suspect this is a form of delayed gratification, which is to say the gratification of achievement or disappointment of failure is delayed or momentarily avoided. This is bad. The cliche is: kicking the can down the road. First of all, I doubt that high school is as competitive as the high school I attended which now represents the wealthiest mid-sized city in the US. The school is far wealthier now than when I attended although when I attended the high school football team was ranked #1 high school team in the nation. Our valedictorian received a full scholarship and invited attendance to Harvard due to the name recognition from the high school. Not many schools have this. The competition was real. The grade inflation was very real. The pressure put onto the school faculty by the parents (there was a lot of money riding this outcome) was extremely real. It is safe to say I have some perspective on this matter. Delayed gratification is bad, because it is a developmental delay. Failure and disappointment are common events that occur in various magnitudes through out life. Teaching a child to accept and move past failure early is healthy. Giving everybody a trophy and pretending there is no failure has not proven to be developmentally healthy. Worse still the school doubling down on their bad decision by institutionalizing a form of grade inflation. This is the opposite of rewarding merit. What is going to happen to the self-esteem of these students when they enter the real world and find they cannot perform as expected and that competition is a very real thing that mommy and daddy cannot save them from?