> If you can get into Harvard, you're supposed to be an A student. This seems to presuppose that the grading system is universal across all universities - i.e.

> If you can get into Harvard, you're supposed to be an A student. This seems to presuppose that the grading system is universal across all universities - i.e. that we would expect the vast majority of Harvard students to get an A, but the vast majority of students at a middling community college to get a C or D. Is this really the case? I'm not American, but in the British education system, this is broadly considered not to be the case - if anything, the more prestigious institutions historically have had much higher standards for each grade. Another expectation is that students' performances at university typically cannot be easily predicted from school grades or tests, and that all universities will have a proportion of students who do very well, and a proportion of students who do not do well at all. There is no real expectation that, say, the Oxbridge universities only take students who will definitely get a first, and the other universities mop up. Oxford and Cambridge are definitely more prestigious and therefore harder to get into, but they're by no means some "sure thing" where if you've passed that hurdle, you'll be able to pass everything else.