Yeah, my high school stopped publishing class ranks in transcripts as of my graduating class because something like you got down to 50 or 60 out of a class of nearly 300 before you got below a 4.0 GPA and it was hurting kids on college admissions.
Liberal arts magnet school that only took the top students in a metro area of 250k people. You had to test in to be admitted and failing any one class meant you went back to one of the area's non-magnet high schools.
So not inflation, just that the student body was limited to kids that were going to make high grades anyway with very heavy AP course loads (which push GPAs over 4.0 since they're weighted).
