lot of this also stems from the societal fantasy that we can directly compare getting an A in an identically titled class at Place X and Place Y. As someone who's taught at a range of institutions, most of us are scaling the intensity of our coursework up or down depending on the student population!
Amanda
this is true enough, but i think the more common hidden premise in the arguments being targeted isn't that the proportion is fixed, but that grades do or should function to provide an ordinal ranking of the student population, rather than assign some absolute level of academic achievement
noam
Arguments against grade inflation often have the premiss that the proportion of excellent people is fixed for a given population. More As mean devalued As. But this seems false: running 100 metres under ten seconds is excellent, but more people now can do it than could a century ago.
