The scope and workload required to earn a grade weren't standardized, but even people who gave lip service to this fact didn't resist the temptation to use them

The scope and workload required to earn a grade weren't standardized, but even people who gave lip service to this fact didn't resist the temptation to use them for purposes of ranking and comparison as if they were. The very people bemoaning grade inflation are the people who used grades most irresponsibly, and their main objection is that they want to continue being irresponsible even though the system has started to route around them. Tough. It looks like the system now uses standardized tests and extracurricular competitions for cross-classroom comparisons and uses grades primarily to assess obedience. To my way of thinking, that's the right direction, in that it actually measures people against each other rather than measuring the arbitrary grading scales of the professors involved.