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Having served on many committees that look at transcripts,
I can tell you that grades are very hard to interpret.
Rampant and non-uniform grade inflation makes this worse,
but that's by no means the only problem: There are so
many uncontrolled dependencies on school, teacher, class
syllabus, etc. that I despair of ever seeing a meaningful
GPA, with or without inflation.
Bottom line: don't let
somebody use the "grades aren't meaningful anymore" argument
to bamboozle you into doing something that you wouldn't
otherwise be doing. I doubt that grades could _ever_ have
been trusted for the purposes some people seem to want them
to serve.
Presumably there are strengths as well as the above weaknesses?
Note that in British universities there is a heavy emphasis
on final exams (which are set by a university board, not by
the individual course professors). So there's centuries of
data available for those who are interested.
Weaknesses of the tripos-based approach include
-- promoting slacking during the year followed by cramming
for the exams.
-- not immune to grade inflation.
-- risk of too much power concentrated in board of examiners;
need for "quality feedback process".
No-win situations include:
-- no way to grade elective special-topics courses. I have
no idea what a grade is _supposed_ to mean in a course
like this. Special topics in basket-weaving? Special
topics in quantum cosmology?