There's a fairly wide variation in grade inflation between schools, which is why a lot of the top grad schools will adjust GPAs for students from schools with grade inflation, or lack thereof, compared to the average.
Companies would do well to do the same, or to simply work on a case by case basis. Sadly, most companies recruit from a fairly small set of schools, and have little knowledge of the grade inflation differences.
If GPAs were the worst of it, then it wouldn't be so bad, but usually the ignorance runs much deeper. I once saw a recruiter for IBM Research's Extreme Blue internship program complain to the audience that he was wasting his time talking to a room full of students, because he could be spending it talking to MIT kids instead -- he was addressing a room with 100+ CS majors from, among others, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, USC, UCLA, UCSD, Cal Poly SLO, and Pomona College.
(As for Extreme Blue, thats interesting because I did their internship last year and the people at my lab were from UCLA, Cal Poly, USC, (and obviously CMU) among others. No MIT though.)
There's a fairly wide variation in grade inflation between schools, which is why a lot of the top grad schools will adjust GPAs for students from schools with grade inflation, or lack thereof, compared to the average.
Companies would do well to do the same, or to simply work on a case by case basis. Sadly, most companies recruit from a fairly small set of schools, and have little knowledge of the grade inflation differences.
If GPAs were the worst of it, then it wouldn't be so bad, but usually the ignorance runs much deeper. I once saw a recruiter for IBM Research's Extreme Blue internship program complain to the audience that he was wasting his time talking to a room full of students, because he could be spending it talking to MIT kids instead -- he was addressing a room with 100+ CS majors from, among others, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, USC, UCLA, UCSD, Cal Poly SLO, and Pomona College.