Hold off on the barrage of questions, I'm trying to understand what you're saying first.

Here are two options

1: The grade a college looks at when deciding if it should accept a student or not are based on competition.

2: The grade a student achieves by completing any given amount of work assigned in a class are based on competition.

Obviously the grades are identical. An A is an A, a B is a B, etc. But I think competition applies to only one of those scenarios.