For students primarily concerned with GPA, tougher grades punish and inflated grades reward. The education of all is a noble and admirable goal, but it does not necessarily imply that all should be educated exactly the same. Perhaps the dearth of true opportunities for our brightest students to reach their potential, combined with an overemphasis on entertainment, have created today's system where colleges must offer remedial courses to ensure basic writing skills and undergraduates often lack rudimentary historical or mathematical knowledge. A school withholds a diploma, a professor gives grades based on merit, a college rejects unqualified applicants - all these things are done to uphold the standards of education and protect the interests of society. Clearly, those who would benefit from a person's education deserve to know the truth about it.
Credentials convey information.
Value is accorded to the bachelor's degree. When it becomes easier to achieve, when one can no longer assume a certain level of competence from those who hold it, that value plummets. As college senior, I fully recognize what a stance like Mansfield's might mean to students. If every teacher had graded me according to what I actually deserved, my GPA might be a full point lower. Or perhaps this increased pressure would have forced me to truly dedicate myself to study.