If you develop a rigorous, reliable assessment for a rigorous, reliable course then the very last thing you should want is to brand its scores in a way that inv

If you develop a rigorous, reliable assessment for a rigorous, reliable course then the very last thing you should want is to brand its scores in a way that invites unfavorable comparisons to degree mill rubber stamp "A"s by people who don't know or can't be bothered, yet this is exactly what you do by calling these grades, fitting them to the ABC scale, putting them on report cards, and weighing them into GPAs. It's madness. Such an assessment would have much more value as a standardized test, entrance exam, etc. Yes, those are much harder to develop, but that's the nature of the beast. If you want to facilitate inter-institution comparisons you need to develop inter-institution standards. There's an orthogonal issue here in assessing the assessment. Imagine a terrible test, one with no meaningful relationship between questions and answers. The scores will follow a very reliable, consistent bell curve with very reliable, consistent statistics. So we can't actually take that as an indication of a good test, even if the best possible test would also behave that way.