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That conclusion must be wrong. Consider someone who aces all the exams at Iowa State - that doesn't imply they could ace the exams at Harvard. However someone who could ace the exams at Harvard could ace the exams at Iowa State. So the top grades cannot be equivalent and in any non-freaky practice it must follow that the lesser grades are also not equivalent as someone who nearly aces the exams is marked relative to the person who does ace the exams.
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I didn't say that someone who aces the exams at Iowa State could also ace the exams at Harvard. I said that we can't conclude that an A- at Iowa State was easier than an A- at Harvard.
Perhaps you didn't see this. I think it emphasizes the same point:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51C0A96E958260
"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."
If I'm wrong it means that students at Iowa State must be graded just as leniently in a class like this as students at Princeton are, and in my experience that is not necessarily true. 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.