“Grades are increasingly a lousy signal, especially at those elite places that just hand out the A’s. So you don't even have that anymore,”
“This is an elite university and a lot of the people at the university are elitists,” one professor said with a laugh. “So they make a lot of inferences about the quality of someone's work and their ability based on where they come from.”
a 2013 article about Harvey Mansfield's war on grade inflation. What's funny is that Harvey Mansfield has been at war against grade inflation for at least 18 years, going back to his anti-Affirmative-Action debate (somehow, affirmative action caused grade inflation among the majority-white population of Harvard, according to Mansfield).
http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~lombardi/edudocs/mansfield_grade...
Back in the '90s, the going theory was that _Vietnam War_ created grade inflation, as schools gave out higher grades to help students get draft deferments. Of course, that was before GWBush taught us that you can draft-dodge just fine with C grades.
I suffered a serious bias of the kind: "Well, this is Harvard, let's try a bit more to make sense out of it, maybe it's you that dont understand"