With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster

I disagree with this statement, at Carnegie Melllon I noticed that a lot of 4.0's were engineered. Students avoid taking hard classes, avoid difficult requirement classes by taking at an easier university, avoid challenging themselves outside of their major.

They are not. My experience as a public school student was far worse than when my parents went to school - double or worse class sizes, no teaching assistants, and occasionally the same textbooks my parents used. "Experienced" teachers were the worst - it often seemed like the only thing they changed over the years was to stop corporal punishment.

My parents required unreasonable numbers of As, so I regularly got undeserved grades just by acting like I'd make a big deal about it... teachers were too overwhelmed to pay attention even if they cared. Some of my peers had helicopter parents that called in arguing their kid deserved an A simply for studying all night, even though that "sudying" was often was just online RPGs.

The trend followed in college for non-major classes. Professors simply didn't care unless a student would be advancing to another class in their department - then they cared enough to fail students, but the grade curve was still logistic. Not the expected "C = passing knowledge".

Even then, I still never saw pedagogical advances outside of brand new assistant professors in liberal arts classes.

Students complain. They complain a lot. We know that we're losing pre-med students to UBC -- which awards much higher grades on average -- because when we ask them why they decided to not accept SFU's admission offer, they reply "I'm planning on becoming a doctor and UBC will give me the higher grades I need". This also happens to a lesser extent with pre-law students. Over the past few years we've started displaying course average grades on transcripts and sending letters to graduate schools saying "so, there's something you should know about SFU's grades...".

I don't know how long SFU will be able to hold the line against grade inflation, but we're trying. It's not fair to students who worked hard to get a GPA of 3.7 (currently around 2% of students manage this) if next year's students can get that just by showing up.

In the mean time, if you see a student with a 4.00 GPA from Simon Fraser University... believe it.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, I pulled some statistics from the class graduating from SFU at the end of the 2017/18 year:

   First Class Honours with Distinction (Honours program, 4.00+ GPA) 6
   Honours with Distinction (Honours program, 3.50+ GPA)            61
   Honours                                                          61
   First Class with Distinction (Major program, 4.00+ GPA)          24
   With Distinction (Major program, 3.50+ GPA)                     265
   Bachelors                                                      1769

The best actionable advice I can give you is: put Caltech on your resume with your years of attendance, leave off your GPA entirely, and indicate in text under that that it's incomplete. You'll need a compelling narrative around why it's incomplete (which is admittedly difficult and usually circumstance-specific) or why it doesn't matter too much given that you've done X. X is something impressive, uncommon, and shows intelligence and initiative. As an example, my Xs were getting press in lifehacker for a side project and doing well in a FANG hackathon while in school.

For jobs, I think a common myth is that your credentials/resume is hugely important. From what I've seen, this is both true and false. The _specifics_ of your resume don't really matter 99% of the time, only that they're interesting. Also, keep in mind most resumes are screened by a real, live human - being authentic and passionate can help out as a break from the BS a recruiter sees day-to-day (but do think about what a recruiter would be looking for at a glance). After you clear the resume filter, you're on a similar playing field vs. every other candidate. And then it's up to you and your ability to pass interviews - that's a whole other topic which I won't cover here =P

If it helps, feel free to reach out through linkedin or email in my profile. Stay focused and keep your chin up!