The data may be accurate, but most of the assumptions here are not accurate. Learning should not be work, measured by hours put into it, and a bell curve is one of the worst things that ever happened to education. Why should students or educators be driven by grades?

Learning should be the goal. There are better ways to assess performance, and we can't be bound by what employers say or do. If we eliminate grades and GPAs, then employers will have to do a better job of evaluating their prospective employees. How about looking at a body of work that is representative of the job? Grades are just letters. They say nothing about learning.

No, they are not scoring better…they just have parents who scream and yell a lot more and insist on grade changes, even at the elementary level (because they are worried about their child being "tracked" in the middle school!), and administration seems to go along with them, even if information is given to the contrary. It is a shift in parental involvement or lack thereof.