GPA Inflation is Destroying Useful Information for Adcoms
The GPA inflation trend over the past few decades makes it difficult to distinguish between top students and only creates fine gradation for student with "poor performance", that is sub 3.5 GPAs. But if you are kind of smart and hard working a 3.5 is guaranteed. If you are very smart and very hard working you can easily break 3.9. Btw, I am not judging the students here, only the grading standards, as I was a poor performer myself.
Students with 3.8+ GPAs are now competing for admissions to top grad programs. Places like Harvard Law School have a mean GPA of 3.8ish and typically have 3.9+ GPAs applicants. They are now using the tenths and hundredths place to distinguish between applicants and prefer those with 4.0 GPAs composed of many A+ because they are "top-censored" which means those students hit the grade ceiling for their school and couldn't event be properly graded. This is the problem.
If the average grade were a 2.0, as was originally intended, we would not have this ceiling effect that effectively destroys information. Abysmal students can now be easily distinguished from bad ones with a 1.6 versus a 2.3 GPA, but that is useless information because those students don't typically apply to grad school. And if they do, they are almost always automatically rejected. Yet the applicants grad schools truly care about, the high achievers, can no longer be more finely sorted without using standardized tests that have fine gradations above the 98th percentile.
GPA inflation might make it seem like everyone is a winner and gets a sticker just for showing up to class but it is a becoming a burden on society. A Stanford Math Ph.D. program might need to know if you are in the 99th percentile versus the 99.99th (i.e. 1 in 100 versus 1 in 10,000).