Eh. (1) I'm more sympathetic to schools that don't graduate everyone - which is part of what the article is arguing for, explicitly - back in the old days when

Eh. (1) I'm more sympathetic to schools that don't graduate everyone - which is part of what the article is arguing for, explicitly - back in the old days when you could pay for college with a couple of summers worth of full time work. Today, it's a crushing debt that will stay with students for decades. The school pretty much owes it to the students to ensure they graduate. That's not an argument for making the school easier, but that the school should be going to whatever ends needed to ensure that the students do get an excellent education. The question isn't "how do I give out a curve?" it's "how do I make sure every single person in this room gets an A-level knowledge of the material?" (2) I majored in a hard science in undergrad (bio major, chem and lit double-minor). Our hardest class was OChem, where the professor would brag that only 4 people per semester would get A's. In OChem 1 I was #6 in the class and got a B; in OChem 2 I was #2 in the class and got an A. I don't see that it did anyone any favors: the actual class knowledge distribution was reasonably bimodal around "people who were clawing over every single point to try and be one of the A's" and "people trying not to get an F". Instead of a grade that reflected their mastery of the knowledge, most of us got lumped into the middle of an artificial bell. But it was orgo: its reputation for killer difficulty gave the professor free reign to grade how he wanted. (3) Do we care about inter-major inflation? Are we worried about the relative difficulty of getting an A in Lit vs. getting an A in biochemistry? Which of the reasoning in favor of "difficult grades" exempts inter-major comparisons? Why don't we care that an A in literature is a joke to get compared to a B in physics? How would we make an A in business as hard to get as an A in chemistry? Who would actually benefit? (4) Much of the criticism of inflation comes from credentialism. Universities were never anything but credential-producers; the only thing that's changed is that enough of the public now attends that that's visible to "the masses." (5) What's the value of a university education? If the answer is " the intrinsic satisfaction of learning", grades are irrelevant. If the answer is "social signaling", then grade inflation is already working as intended. If the answer is "job training," then grades of any arbitrary difficulty will still generally be a poor proxy for how one will function in an actual job environment. What's the defense for the value of grading? (6) I appreciate that we implicitly deny the idea that students might be getting better. Average scores on med student board exams have been climbing YoY for a while, as new and better study aids keep getting released. The average med student now knows, objectively, more and better than his predecessors did. is it shocking that something similar may occur in other fields? If it is, damn, that's a more amazing failure of the educational industry than any amount of inflation.