What a diploma measures when A’s are the new normal
I keep thinking about what a transcript is actually for. If everyone gets an A, the grade stops sorting anyone, and the diploma quietly loses the one job it was hired to do. Families are paying top dollar this fall for a piece of paper that says "you did fine," which is a strange thing to spend tens of thousands on.
That said, I'm not sure the fix is to hand out more C's. A lot of the pressure toward inflated grades comes from real forces: students who are genuinely prepared, course evaluations, retention targets, and the simple fact that nobody wants to be the professor who tanks a kid's scholarship. Blaming individual teachers misses how the whole system is wired.
What I'd want to know next is how employers actually read these transcripts. If they've already adjusted for inflation, then the grades may still communicate something useful, just in a different way. And if they haven't, that's a problem worth solving at the hiring end, not just the grading end.