[AnthonyMouse]

> This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard.

What might actually help here is to move to a two-tiered method of grading. One is the actual grade, which is solely for the student as a personal evaluation and never made available to anyone outside the school, and the other is a pass/fail for the course.

Then if you have a D for the first half of the semester, you know you need to work harder because there is a significant risk that you don't pass the course. And mediocre students actually fail courses and either have to repeat them until they genuinely master the subject matter or have a "fail" show up on their transcript.

But the school doesn't disadvantage their students by giving out a B as the most common grade when other schools give As, and thereby doesn't deprive their students of honest performance feedback or make it impossible to fail bad students because when the 40th percentile students have an A the "bad" students have a B- when they deserve an F.