Why should they be compared to other students? A grade point average should stand alone. Life doesn't grade on the curve.
I agree with your sentiments but since grading standards vary from high school to high school, how could you compare GPA from different schools. Granted, the quality of students from different high schools will also differ but at least a college admission office would know what rank a particular student is in his/her high school
Even GPA is a joke now.
When I went to school, F=0.0, D=1.0, c=2.0, b=3.0, a=4.0
Only the younger teachers gave half grades, c+, b+, etc, because technically, they didnt' exist.
Now, some schools actually give you a 4.5 for an a+ and give you a bonus point if the class is judged to be "hard". THat's just not fair. 4.0 was perfect in my day. If you are getting 4.5s figured into your average you are cheating. If you get a bonus of 1 point for a "hard" class, like math, you are cheating. In some schools nowdays, If you get an a+ in advanced algebra, you get a 5.5 added into your GPA.
Do you think that is fair?
"..The idea behind grading on a curve is that, rather than awarding a 100% to any student who gets a perfect score, the student with the highest score gets 100%, with all lower scores being tweaked accordingly. The point of this is that then the grades are not affected if the instructor has been teaching poorly, or if the test is more difficult (or easier) than anticipated by the instructor. It also serves to make school more competitive. There's more than one way to implement a curve-grading scheme, depending on the instructor's personal preference and the amount of effort they're willing to put into grading..."
Actually it does. By almost any measure of achievement, folks sort themselves out into a bell-curve, with a few super-high and super-low achievers and a bunch of folks in the middle.
The reason the left wants to eliminate class rankings is that Black and Hispanic kids do worse, on average, than do Asian, Jewish and White kids. In the leftist mind, you have to eliminate anything that will distinguish because any distinction that does not favor Blacks and Hispanics is, by definition, racist. So you eliminate class rankings. You argue that GPA is sufficient, But the next step is GPA becomes meaningless because everybody gets an A--it's called grade inflation and it's already happening.
It's unfair to the kids who work hard (of any race or creed) because they aren't allowed to stand out from the pack.