<p>Well, what can I say - I think it’s a case of stupid organizations doing stupid things. For example, one could just as easily ask why Princeton recently actually (foolishly) curbed its own grade inflation, only to have none of its competing schools such as HYS follow suit. Princeton just gravely damaged itself. </p>
<p>Look, the fact is, organizations do stupid things all the time. You can’t always expect organizations to behave in a manner that may be perfectly logical to an outsider. Berkeley probably feels (erroneously) that it is actually helping its students by implementing tough grading policies that the outside world will respect. The problem is that the outside world doesn’t respect tough grading policies, as numerous empirical studies have found. When you compare one candidate with a 3.5 and another with a 3.2 - everything else being equal - it is highly tempting to simply choose the guy with the 3.5 </p>
<p>One could also easily ask the question of why don’t graduate adcoms simply ‘correct’ for the differing admission policies of the various undergrad colleges? After all, Berkeley is not a small, unknown school. Berkeley is large and famous. Hence, you would think that grad school adcoms would know that Berkeley students are graded harder than students of other schools, and compensate accordingly. That would be the behavior to expect if organizations behaved rationally. Yet the fact is not even Berkeley’s own grad school adcoms seem to know, or care. For example, a Berkeley undergrad who wants to be admitted to Berkeley’s own law school needs the same GPA, and perhaps higher, compared to applicants from other programs. To that, I would point to a simple asymmetry of incentives that faces all adcoms. All adcoms are judged by the performance of the students they actually admit, not on the performance of the students they didn’t admit, but should have. So if the Berkeley Law School adcom erroneously rejects a bunch of Berkeley undergrads who would have turned out to be excellent law students, nobody will ever know.</p>