Is high school grade inflation part of the reason why college admissions seems more competitive?

[cobrat]

I completely agree, @4gulls. But to some extent that has always been true. I remember an excellent high school teacher of mine, almost 40 years ago, giving out two grades on every essay in our senior year English class–the high school grade (which is the one he recorded for the course) and the college grade (just to let us know what the standards were going to be when we got to college). I remember watching anxiously over the course of the year as my grades went from B/D to A/C to A/B and finally to A/A. When I actually got to college I was pleasantly surprised to find his judgment confirmed and extremely grateful that he had prepared me for higher standards.

While my HS teachers didn’t provide 2 sets of grades as yours did, a few…particularly one with whom I had a serious personality conflict in 9th grade emphasized how much harder college was compared to HS.

Oddly enough, once I actually attended college despite my abysmal HS GPA, I found my experience was nearly the complete opposite. I found my undergrad Profs at a top 25 LAC and a couple of elite Us and a few grad Profs at an elite U graded much more leniently than my HS teachers.

If I had to choose between HS and college Profs for leniency in grading…the college/grad school Profs win by a landslide IME.