Next level grade inflation "A+++", "totally awesome A", "A totally even more awesome then A+++:.

In all seriousness, this is not rigid bureaucracy preventing something that would be useful. Just because prof have such an emotional reaction to someones unusual effort does not mean new grade has a reason to exist.

I guess it depends on the grading system doesn't it? I mean, if the top mark is essentially 100% to mean "there's nothing that reasonably could have been done to improve it" and A is defined as 80-100, then you can't to better than A. Or if the top mark is 1.0 and the worst passing mark is 4.0, and A means 1.0, then you can't do better than A.

They already went way outside, above and beyond anything I could've imagined. How do you change a grade decades after the course? Surely they're locked down soon after. To me, just going off and making it an A (rather than the professor just saying "well I've got egg on my face don't I?") is already incredible and a generous deviation from the bureaucracy.

Oh absolutely! I simply want to challenge the disempowering language of bureaucracy that involves saying someone "can't" do something.

There's literally an infinite number of ways to adapt the system to allow for a higher-than-A grade. Choosing to not do it is still a choice.

I'm not claiming they should've done anything different. I'm merely making sure bureaucracy's responsibility in this matter is pinned down.

"I can't do it" is pretty much normal way how to convey not just it is physically impossible. It normally means:

* It is not up to me to decide that, it would be overreaching my mandate to make that change. * This is against my moral values. * This is against rules that everyone else bothered to follow.

All these are valid choices and right choices. The bureaucracy responsibility in cases like this is literally to resist the pressure to make exception just so someone feels good.