Scale Tool Grip Location

Can the grip locations be adjusted when using the Scale Tool? In other words, making a selection and choosing the scale tool will provide grip points to scale the object, corners, middle, etc. Can those points be moved prior to scaling?

No. The grips are attached to the object’s bounding box. You can make your selection a group or component, edit it and use the Tape Measure tool to scale it uniformly to a given distance.