You got a good point. My school is listed as a school that has grade inflation but anecdotally I feel my engineering department was pretty brutal. Average GPA was below 3 when I was there.
It could be my personal situation was not representative of the norm.
This is no longer how “high pedigree” schools function in the US. There is too much blowback from helicopter parents and the kids who haven’t ever had to deal with critical feedback before.
Lookup “grade inflation” if you want to be horrified by the quality decline of “pedigree education”.