Timothy Taylor on grade inflation

Timothy Taylor (an award winning economics professor) has a very interesting post on grade inflation (see full post here).  In part he says,

Like so many other bad habits, grade inflation is lots of fun until someone gets hurt. Students are happy with higher grades. Faculty are happy not quarreling with students about grades.

When I refer to someone getting hurt by grade inflation, I'm not talking about the sanctity of the academic grading process, which is a mildly farcical concept to begin with and at any rate too abstract for me. I'm also not referring to how it gets harder for law and business schools to sort out applicants when so many students have high grades. In the great list of social problems, the difficulties of law and B-school admissions offices don't rank very high.

To me, the real and practical problem of grade inflation is that it causes students to alter their choices, away from fields with tougher grading, like the sciences and economics, and toward fields with easier grading. 

As an economist, Mr. Taylor gets to one of the more important issues for society at large.  In an economy built around the fundamental issues of "supply and demand," grade inflation ends up distorting the choice of a vocation (relative to the needs of the economy).  Mr. Taylor is adding his voice to several recent articles discussing data that shows students are increasingly choosing "the path of least resistance" in college.  Mr. Taylor concludes his piece as follows:

In short, grade inflation in the humanities has been contributing to college students moving away from science, technology, engineering, and math fields, as well as economics, for the last half century. It's time for the pendulum to start swinging back. A gentle starting point would be to making the distribution of grades by institution and by academic department (or for small departments, perhaps grouping a few departments together) publicly available, and perhaps even to add this information to student transcripts. If that answer isn't institutionally acceptable, I'm open to alternatives.