Is that at least inpart responsible for the outrageous grade inflation
we see in the schools, including "elite" colleges?

Now you have hit on one of my pet peeves.
This could go OT very quickly!
I fully agree with you on this topic.
I started tracking the Honor and Merit rolls from our local newspaper
and plotting those numbers against the total class size for each of the
four middle schools in our system.
One school had 80% of its students with GPA's above 3.0!