<p>My point is that I don’t think that, among the 15 top colleges in the country, the grading differences are as drastic as some people think. Of course, MIT is likely to be harder than your normal state school but, if you control for major, I’m not so sure that there is much difference in the difficulty of top colleges.</p>
<p>I think the only schools, among the top schools, at which you might suspect grade deflation would be MIT, Cal Tech, perhaps UChicago. However, there’s no evidence (outside of anecdotal) that grade deflation (relative to other top colleges) exist at these schools. Furthermore, they are so different from the other top schools that it’s hard to imagine someone equally happy at MIT vs., say, Duke. So, these MIT vs. Princeton or grade-deflated school vs. grade-inflated school comparisons might have grounds only in purely hypothetical terms.</p>