Historically, the “grade deflation” reputation at Hopkins has been tied to the fact that they (as well as MIT) used to take pride in the “rigor” of their curriculum and promote the fact that grading freshman year needed to be pass fail so as to allow students to adjust to the harsher grading policy. (MIT has a freshman pass/fail grading policy as well).
More recently, Hopkins has has tried to shed their “cut-throat” reputation in an effort to broaden their appeal (and rise in the rankings), but until recently they were never willing to drop the pass/fail freshman grading as proof (which made some people skeptical).
Most recently, Hopkins voted to drop the freshman pass/fail grading policy (starting this fall). It will be interesting to see what happens going forward, but at a minimum, this makes it difficult to compare current average GPA’s with other schools.