"… We have been told that high school grades will be the new, better standard for determining college admissions. But how can this be, given widespread grade inflation? Discussing the parallel phenomenon of college grade inflation (45 percent of all college grades today are A’s; A’s have become in fact the most common grade given in college), I argued here that grade inflation devalues the currency of education—transcripts—in the same manner and through the same dynamic as monetary inflation devalues the dollar.
Stated simply, Gershenson’s finding that affluent students are the biggest recipients of priming the grading pump likely owes to the fact that, unlike many inner-city and minority students, affluent students believe that they are college-bound; thus they (and their helicopter parents) lobby schools harder for the grades they need to get into the college they choose." …