Grades are also fraught with bias, and in a lot of cases measure compliance more than mastery of the material.
In England, A Levels have gotten to the point where each year more people get an A for a subject than the previous year. This is analogous to the Soviet harvests beating each preceding years. Not they have A* grades or some such derivative to say that it's a "real" A grade.
that's incredibly inaccurate and naive