Ruediger, interesting question. The pressure on professors today for grade inflation is enormous. We see it everywhere. A graduate student is given a C on a paper that is clearly average according to the grading rubric for the course, and the next thing you know they have filed a complaint with the Dean that you are being biased in your grading. The student also lets you know they have always received As from the other professors (as if that has a bearing on thist particular paper).

After a dozen or so complaints of such, and continued requests by the Department to see if you cannot re-evaluate the grade you've given--though you've given detailed critiques on the papers and lined them up precisely with the grading rubric--it goes into your evaluation file as a mark. In an open enrollment program we find many students who are oblivious to APA and sentence structure with an occasional student who is impeccable in their writing. I believe the standards and grading rubrics are there at all reputable institutions, but the political pressure within each institution varies a great deal and the students have become, in my observation, more brazen at questioning their grades.

As you mentioned, an A- is like the end of the world. In retrospect, many of the students for which I've offered fair grades with which they were not happy at the time, have written me much later saying it was my critiques in the margin and honest grading that led them to hone their skills and that it prodded them toward excellence. My files are chock full of such comments--but usually they come postcoursework.

Most of my teaching has been at grad school level, and there we expect the students to be more self-starting and rely less on didactic learning. Many are already working professionals in their chosen field. But nothing compensates for lack of writing and synthesis skills. I try to make students know up front that I follow the grading rubric strictly and although there is room for judgement in cases of exceptional skills that may overcome some of the lesser skills on the over all grade they need to know early on that fair gading is part of the guidance a professor gives his/her students. Liberal grading and that which is not consistent does them a terrible disservice, in my opinion.

We have a different problem relating the original question in many institutions in Thailand. It's not so much to push students' grade to the maximum A+, rather it is about dragging weaker students through the system without letting them fail. That's more a cultural mindset than a policy. Professors that were educated abroad (reading above comments obviously some time ago) are generally more strict in grading (and marking).

I have to admit, though, I don't like grading. If you think of assessing other people and their achievements, you certainly have to take into account a broad set of indicators, and not only the correctness of answers to test questions. I try to do my best to consider social and individual factors as well to tune grades. As @Max put it: '[grading] that is not consistent does them [the students] a terrible disservice'.

In the end, we have to ask what is consistent (and unbiased, I add) grading.

Yes, it is a huge responsibility to grade another's work. Undergraduate level work tends to be more straightforward, I find, because we do not require as much critical thinking but more didactic learning from the textbook. At the graduate level, however, critical thinking is in the grading rubrics and by doctoral level we expect them to question even the textbook. It is amazing the errors and unsettled issues that my doctoral students find in their textbooks, some of them as qualified to write the textbook as the author themselves. So, it is incumbent on us who teach at the doctoral level to expect students bring broader perspectives and more confidence to their critical analyses.