I teach a lot of industrial technical classes. I can tell you that A may be the most common grade but the abilities I see don’t merit such.
1. I had an entire table of 6 engineers who could not even plug numbers into a formula and get the right answers. They didn’t know how to work within the parentheses first then add or do the other operations. WTF?
2. When the get the wrong answer their immediate conclusion is that I got the wrong answer. Never mind that I’ve taught this stuff and done this stuff for more decades than they have been alive.
3. Teaching test has left them vacant of reasoning ability. They want to know the answer to pass the test. Give them a problem and they melt.
I’m not encouraged for the future in more ways than one.
I teach a lot of industrial technical classes. I can tell you that A may be the most common grade but the abilities I see don’t merit such.
Used to be a student could feel a real sense of accomplishment if they got an A. Now with almost everyone getting an A, it’s like “so what?”
Without going into details, I work for a military base supporting the USAF. About 6 years ago, the base hired a bunch of "Engineering Technology" folks to do low level engineering work. These "Engineers" demonstrated the gifts you describe, and after "a bunch" of money was wasted, the base brought in some "Electrical Engineers" - who were able to solve the myrad of relatively simple problems within a year.
The 2-Star who ran this base, and several other bases in neighboring states isssued a directive - "Absolutely no hiring of Engineering Technology degreed personnel, regardless of experience level without his direct involvement".
This small group of incompetent "engineers" have ruined the chances of hundreds or thousands of other "Engineering Technology" degreed professionals from pursing a degree with the USAF.
Is the Bell Curve at play ?
I worked part-time as a math tutor while in college. It was ridiculous the number of people going for math-heavy majors who I had to teach junior-high-level math to.
One guy even seemed proud of the fact that he’d never learned to multiply or divide. He even tried to trick me into taking one of his tests for him!!!