Grade whoring was never my thing while I was in school. I can only recall doing it a couple of times.

Once was in high school physiology when I was short of an A by six points and cried my eyes out because the teacher had said at the beginning of the school year that he never bumped anyone up - “What you get is what you deserve.” Well, he did and an A was what I deserved!

The other time was in college when I took a med school microbiology class. Med school classes had a grading curve that I didn’t understand and even though I had scores of extra credit, I still ended up with a B at the end of class. (I guess the extra credit was actually factored into the curve so I didn’t make it into the A range.) I was applying to grad school at the time and needed every fraction of a decimal point I could get in my GPA, so I wrote an e-mail explaining my situation and begging for my grade to be changed (the report card had already been issued). Thankfully, the professor obliged.

In my experience, grades mean even more to people who are high achievers and used to getting top grades. At Ivy League school, Cornell University, many students choose their courses based on level of difficulty.

In 1997 Cornell University began posting median grades for every course online, so that students could put their own grades in a larger perspective. (After all, an A in “Physics for Poets” is presumably less impressive than an A in “Physics for Physicists.”) The university’s theory–which reveals an astonishing naivet? about human nature–was that this would encourage students to choose more-challenging courses. Instead, according to a paper published early this year by two Cornell economists, the policy provided a case study in how to pump up GPAs. Armed with accurate, official grading information, students used it to pick easy classes and avoid difficult ones: once-hidden guts were now readily identified, enrollment in them ballooned, and since the new policy was instituted the overall rate of grade inflation–already a subject of concern at Cornell, as in the academic world in general–has more than doubled.

~The Atlantic Monthly; June 2005; Primary Sources (subscription only)

I never went quite as far as these kids and always chose classes based on my ultimate goal - to learn the methods of disease control and prevention. But, one of the reasons I gave up on going to med school was because chemistry and physics were too hard, so I simply didn’t take them. My grades in those courses wouldn’t have been good enough to get me in.

Grade inflation is rampant across every level of education in the U.S. All students think they deserve an A regardless of how they compare to others. And maybe they do. They deserve to get A’s in the classes where they have the strongest ability; not A’s in every single class they take.

Sadly, grades are a big part of success whether represented by letter grades in school or scores on job evaluations. No matter how much we want to think that everyone is equal and has the ability to succeed, it’s just not true. We all have different abilities that will hopefully find a venue where they can be recognized.