<p>I agree engineering is a tough major. But it is tough everywhere, not just at Cornell. </p>
<p>Yes, Harvard was mocked into reducing the number of students who graduate with honors, but it dod not change the grade distributions. So students get the same grades now as they did before, it just takes higher grades to graduate with honors. Grades do not really tell you much about a person anyway. How could you standardize them? Grades are the results of independent decisions made by tens of thousands of professors at colleges across the country. There are standardized tests taken by people applying to graduate or professional schools. On those tests the grads of “grade inflated” schools do very well. So perhaps they are not so inflated after all.</p>