Where the median GPA is 3.35? No, I would not. By definition of A being excellent, B…good and C, satisfactory, the median HMC student is Good. Median has classically been satisfactory. HMC doesn’t deflate, they just inflate less than the rest.
This is not unique to HMC, but is unusual for a private school. Part of that is the majors they offer. Engineering and adjacent majors run lower at all institutions.
Purdue and Cal Poly have long been known as tough grading institutions for engineering at least. The year my son graduated from Cal Poly, a Software Engineer graduated with a 4.0. It had been 10 years since the last engineering 4.0.
Wellesley had a higher average GPA than either Brown or Stanford in 2000. I haven’t looked at all institutions, but they very well could have had the highest grade inflation in the nation that year. You can call reversion to the mean deflation or less inflation. Based on their 1960s median GPA of 2.73, I choose less inflation.
Do you have a recent source for that median GPA? Most recent I see is 2007.
Regardless, any Mudd average GPA will be somewhat inflated as the majority of first semester freshman classes are graded on a HP/P/F scale, because historically there were quite a few Cs, Ds, and Fs that semester.
Grade deflation for a particular course means students who are taking the course are given lower average grades than similar students who took the same course in years past. That’s simply not the case for any school (Harvey Mudd, MIT, and even Caltech included).
Overall grade deflation at a particular school means the average GPA at that school is lower today than in years past. That’s even less true anywhere.