I’m totally against lowering grade standards to the point of eliminating failing grades.
However, over the years we’ve seen some weird grading differences in colleges my kid has attended. The school he received his BA from gave lowered grade point for an A- (anything below a 94), but not a higher grade point for a solid A (go figure)...the grad school he’s in has a weird A, A/B, B, B/C, etc. scale, but both schools have given F’s, in fact he has a friend who failed a course last term (I wasn’t sure they did that sort of thing at grad school because of the expensive tuition, I wondered if they made accommodations for extra work, etc. in order to bring up your grade. But no, they’ll still give you an F if you deserve it, and his friend had to repeat the course.)
That being said, the part about getting a grade point higher than a 4.0 is nothing new. I went to high school almost 40 years ago and I graduated with a grade point above 4.0. It had to do with what were then called “honors classes”...you received a 5.0 for an A in an honors class, thus the higher than 4.0 GPA.
I concur with your assessment.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I felt the inappropriate use of the bell curve on many occasion.
I remember receiving my only failing grade in a graduate computer science design course I took as an undergrad, had the highest mid-term and final exam grades in the class of about 50 grad students, but was failed because I couldn’t get all my homework assignments in on time. I was taking over 21 hours of a solid science-engineering curriculum that semester and didn’t have more than about 4 to 4-1/2 hrs of sleep in any 24 hr period throughout the year, with all other time devoted to study, including eating and bathroom time.
The injustice in that assessment is apparent when exposed to people who pass a Microsoft credential and are considered experts, but who are clueless as to the design of the systems they operate.
In elite institutions, those who are flunked are too frequently associated with not understanding the material by the outside world, whereas within the elite community, the failure is used more to support those who are financed to continue their effort while those not so positioned are moved out of the race.