[ QUOTE ]
People don't want to believe that it can be easier to get the A- at Princeton than at Iowa State, but it can be.
[/ QUOTE ]
You haven't demonstrated that, just asserted it repeatedly. What I have shown is that comparable classes (e.g., the first introduction to abstract algebra, or freshman "calculus") cover a lot more material at elite schools.
[ QUOTE ]
"For most people, if you are getting A's, it means you are doing good work," said Tucker Culbertson, 20, a Princeton junior majoring in English. "If you go to class and participate and write a semi-intelligible paper you get an A."
[/ QUOTE ]
Even if we take this 20-year-old as an expert (which I don't), so what? Are you claiming it is just as easy to participate in a class and write a semi-intelligible paper at an elite school as it is at a mediocre school? I think the standards for "semi-intelligible" are much higher at elite schools.
For example, here are some
papers written by MIT students, I believe mostly freshmen math majors since this was in the second semester of the introduction to analysis. The ones I flipped through aren't great, but they blow away what is expected of second year mathematics majors at typical schools. (At many schools, the introduction to proofs class is aimed at juniors. How do they call themselves math majors before that?) I sat through many worse presentations when I attended the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, where the presenters were typically seniors from mediocre schools.
Even if it is easier to get an A- at an Ivy League school than a typical state school, I would still bet that an A- at an Ivy League school represents more understanding on average than an A- at Iowa State.
There is a component of grade inflation, and you might find that students at Dartmouth are not as bright or as qualified as students at Yale while getting higher grades, or vice versa. However, in my experience this factor is much smaller than the difference between the caliber of the courses at elite schools and mediocre schools.
I mentioned Iowa State because a friend of mine went there. He enjoyed a lot of extra attention from the professors, and he thought he was getting a Harvard-quality education there... until he worked with a bunch of Harvard students, not even the best of Harvard, and found that his background wasn't close.
There are a lot of schools, including better UC campuses and some of the Ivy League schools, where there are widely different ranges of students. These students have the ability to do get a mediocre education, or an elite education, as they choose. However, it is difficult to make it through the required classes at Caltech without getting a great education in the sciences, and it is difficult to get anything close to that while getting straight As at a typical state school.