<p>I will give you a hypothetical example, kwu, in order to further illustrate my point.</p>
<p>Bob and Fred want to major in physics because of their interest in the subject, but neither wants to pursue it as a career but instead want to go into law. Both students are of equal intelligence and ability.</p>
<p>Bob attends Stanford University, and Fred goes to Princeton University. They both are challeneged by the coursework to an equal degree, and both produce work of similar quality. </p>
<p>However, because of Princeton’s grading policy, that quality of work is worth roughly a B+ to Fred’s professor. Bob earns an A because of Stanford’s grade inflation. This occurrence continues in approximately the same fashion throughout the four years each attends. Fred ends up with a 3.4 and Bob a 3.75. </p>
<p>Bob and Fred have learned almost the same material and have acheived equal success in demonstrating their problem solving abilities. Both are deserving of the same grade by any objective measure. However, because of inequalities in the grading policies at different schools, they end up with meaningfully different GPA’s .</p>
<p>Both Bob and Fred apply to Yale Law School and have excellent LSAT scores (175+). The admissions officers charged with reviewing their applications are vaguely familiar with the deflation at Princeton and accordingly give an arbitrary increase in GPA of .1 to Fred in a well-intentioned attempt to level the playing field. Despite this increase, Fred’s grades don’t cut it against the rest of the applicant pool. Bob’s do, however, and he gets accepted.</p>
<p>In this situation, I cannot imagine a reasonable justification that grade deflation helped Fred in any way. In fact, it is clear that he was hurt by it.</p>
<p>However, there is the reasonable potentional that, for many students, the lower grades will serve as an impetus for a reinvigorated attitute toward schoolwork. This, unfortunately, is not a good argument; the stronger it seems to be, the more it falls apart in reality.</p>
<p>The more people who are truly incentivized to work harder by grade deflation, which, if true for many, would ultimately make deflation a positive for most, the more deflation is prevalent. The unadjusted class averages would continue to rise, only to be recurringly deflated in order to serve as a continued incentive. </p>
<p>This scenario, which would otherwise have a decidedly negative impact on students’ performance, is helped at the top by the fact that, supposedly, all students who “deserve” an A get one. But if this uniformly admirable response (the students’ working harder) exists, which is seemingly what the proponents of grade deflation argue, the local standard for what constitutes a “deserved” A is surely altered.</p>
<p>With that said, if newfound commitment to studying only occurs in few, then it is a good thing for those people. The general desensitization that results in situations in which many work harder in response to relatively low grades does not occur when few respond in that way. </p>
<p>It seems that grade deflation can be a good thing for a select group who is motivated by such things, assuming that the meritorious response is limited to this group. I can not see the merits, however, of a more generally applied argument that claims that grade deflation is beneficial to the majority of those to which it is applied in either a practical or intellectual sense.</p>