There was nothing self-contradictory about my comments, whatever their faults may have been.
My point is that grades do NOT necessarily indicate how good a student is. I am convinced that this is true.
In most cases, students who work hard and have genuine academic ability will get good grades.
I did not say that ALL students with low grades deserve higher ones. In some cases if a student does not work hard , neglects his or her work, and lacks academic ability and intellectual curiosity, the low grades are deserved. But not in every case.
Still, grades can be a crap shoot. What some one said about it being difficult to get a low grade today because of grade inflation may be true in some schools, but I never experienced this in my days of high school, undergraduate and graduate school many years ago in the 70s and 80s.
In many cases, a professor would not give you an A or even a B no matter how hard you worked, or how much knowledge and academic ability you had, or how much you participated in class.
I myself never had much luck with grades, even though many professors admitted that my knowledge and academic ability was so far above most other students where I studied you couldn't measure it.
Some even said that I had no business being in their classes because I knew far more about the subject they were teaching than they did !