[norwaypinesavage]

As a contrast, I graduated in 1968 from the University of Minnesota Mechanical Engineering department which at the time was rated third in the US, behind only MIT and Stanford. I had 3.2 GPA. That means that I had more Bs than As. My diploma reads “With Honors”, which meant I was somewhere in the top 10 percent of the graduating class. The university gave me a gold shoulder tassel to wear at the graduation ceremony to signify this. I have no idea what Harvard or Yale were doing at the time, but I’ll bet it wasn’t a lot different. This demonstrates how bad grade inflation has been since then.

[Verginius Rufus]

It was around 1969 that student evaluations of professors came in, I think, and that's probably connected to the grade inflation of subsequent years. Hard graders got bad evaluations which the administration could use to deny tenure to tenure-track faculty. I don't know how often that actually happened but it made tenure-track faculty worry about low scores on evaluations.

The media made a big deal about GWB's GPA at Yale (how his transcript got leaked was never explained)--B's and C's--but that was before grade inflation. And Kerry's and Gore's GPAs were not much different from Bush's.