The purpose of grades is not to rank a group or track aggregate outcomes. The purpose is to assess the degree to which an individual student met the requirements of an individual assignment. A side effect is that sorting and ranking can take place. Grade inflation may be a phenomena, but it isn't a problem because the goal of the people giving the grade is not to give out the highest grades or equal grades, but to communicate their assessment of the student's learning to the student. Even my worst professors were trying to pass on the same knowledge to all of the students (a goal of "equal outcomes") They were not concerned with ranking students.
Grade inflation is NOT an upward trend in grades, reflective of learning more.
Grade inflation IS:
"An increase in student grades (and by extension, their grade point average) without corresponding evidence of any increase in achievement." (Potter, Nyman & Klump, 2001) (Eaton, Sarah & Penaluna, Ann. (2019). Grading with integrity: Opening the uncomfortable conversation around grade inflation.)
I do not think that that is necessarily the definition that everyone (or even most people) are using for "grade inflation." When I have seen the term used, it seems to most often be in the context of "in my day, you had to get a 90% to get an A, and nowadays you can get an A with a 85%!" Where I went to college, the exams were hard enough that you might get an A with a 50%, so I find the fixation on achievement in terms of percentage correct to be particularly pointless.
I agree that we can't really have a meaningful discussion of grade inflation without some kind of agreement about what it is. But even if we agree to the quoted definition, that doesn't mean that any other publication that it discussing it is going to use the same standard. That makes it hard to cite evidence to support that it even is going on, let alone that it is a problem that needs to be solved.
