You can't without standardized metrics, is the problem! If no one's failing, must someone always get a D?

Not in a given class, but across all instances of that class, surely it will be more normal.

Not if the population is not a random sample. Cal Tech admits would have no problem doing a two year A.S. in CS in one semester. Doesn’t mean you can expect the same of the average community college student. A highly selected student population could easily have the worst student in class at Harvard doing better than the best student at Directional State U.

Why does this make any sense?

Generally speaking, students at top universities are intelligent and hard-working. Their talent is not normally distributed, and this is increasingly the case as admissions becomes hyper-competitive. Not to mention, students self-select into courses to which they are most suited and likely to perform well.

If all students in a particular class master the subject matter, why should some students be forced to receive failing grades?

Should the purpose of higher education be to rank students on increasingly marginal criteria or to...educate?

It's what is done in Australia. It works pretty well.

Failing grades are not handed out this way, if you demonstrate a basic understanding of the material you pass. But actually getting an HD, the top mark, is only for the top 20% or so from each class.

It means in Australia for a technical subject if you get First Class Honours you can get into a PhD program and get a scholarship and get through in 3 years if you work hard.

> rank students on increasingly marginal criteria or to...educate?

You can still educate perfectly fine while making the assignments and tests very difficult. Do students attend schools to get A’s or to get educated?

Because the average score should be a 2.0 GPA.

If that university has a better fount of students then an A at that uni is better than an A at another uni. Don’t worry, institutional reputation is already a thing, so that’s not a problem. Grade inflation means you have no idea how poorly of well someone is because everyone gets a “participation” score.

You just used different words to re-state the same assertion that achievement should be shoehorned into a normal distribution regardless of students' actual performance. Why?

> Grade inflation means you have no idea how poorly of well someone is because everyone gets a “participation” score.

As I argued above, a high GPA is not a "participation" score, it is an achievement score. It just happens that achievement at top universities is generally high across the board.

And frankly, giving everyone an A is a far more desirable outcome than pitting students against each other in an artificially competitive and high-stress environment where the alternative is group study and collaboration.

> It just happens that achievement at top universities is generally high across the board.

Happens at lower universities as well. Turns out the cause isn’t “high achievement” but instead it’s entire generations of students that treat anything lower than an A as a failure and subsequently pressure admin to make the prof back off.

Why should the average score be a 2.0 GPA, especially given that many courses require grade of C or better in pre-req courses?

wut, that is a failing grade in most universities....

Under 2.0 or 2.2 GPA (depending on your school) and you are on academic probation. If you have an academic scholarship, you must maintain at least a 3.0 (B) average.... Which seems fair.

The true average is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.0.

I think that universities can normalize a student's grades using their high school's distribution to level playing field amongst all schools, meaning the grade inflation isn't even working. The UC system is going to have more than enough data to figure out those distributions.

Plenty of schools fiddle with that or just refuse to provide the data.