> what I mean by "meaningful" here Then what do you mean by meaningful here? I can't think of anything people would consider more meaningful than ability to pr

> what I mean by "meaningful" here Then what do you mean by meaningful here? I can't think of anything people would consider more meaningful than ability to produce/provide in relation to educations purpose in todays society. No one presumes we're talking about underwater basket-weaving when we talk about the education system, because it's rather focused on enabling the youth to learn the skills necessary to compete in todays economy. > GPA predicting success is, as you note, a self fulfilling prophesy This is not an argument I made - it's a possibility, but I do not consider that to be an understood fact and I believe anyone, myself included, would have a very difficult time evidencing this claim in either direction (which is what I noted). > so if we just assigned them at random, and then colleges and employers continued to take them seriously This is quite the qualifier - no one would take GPAs seriously if we assigned them at random for the same reasons employers don't hire from their stacks of applicants at random. > And then if in successive generations we assigned your GPA to be the average of your parent's GPA - still great? GPA isn't a measurement against past generations, it's a measurement against your peers - this isn't a valid use of the metrics GPA try to provide. We have testing that attempts to answer "is the current generation more educated than the past?" but that metric is not GPA. Things like literacy rate would be useful for estimating if our education system is getting better.