From 1990-2020, four-year college grade point averages (GPAs) rose more than 16% at public and non-profit universities. “A” is now the most common grade awarded at American universities—sometimes by comical proportions. For example, in 2020-21, Harvard University awarded “A’s” 79% of the time—and Yale recorded the same rate of awarding A’s in 2022-23. When top marks are awarded to nearly every student, grading becomes a farce.
This trend of declining grading rigor is commonly referred to as “grade inflation.” Research suggests the primary drivers of grade inflation are first, educators responding to “consumer demand” for higher grades from students and second, students self-selecting into less rigorous courses and disciplines. Without question, sites like RateMyProfessor compound both drivers.
If students’ motivations behind wanting higher grades are obvious, educators’ motivations are only slightly less so: happy students are easier to deal with, and they write more favorable evaluations. So, if lax grading makes everyone happy, what’s the problem? Why can’t everyone be winners?
I’ll explain why.
When an “A” grade becomes a participation trophy, grades cease to function as meaningful records of student achievement and content mastery. This causes several problems.
First, absent the ability to make finer distinctions—such as between “excellent,” “good,” and “merely adequate work”—student effort wanes, causing learning and skills acquisition to plummet.
Second, without reliable indicators of student knowledge and diligence, employers and graduate admissions officers are forced to turn to other, potentially less useful, criteria to evaluate candidates.
Finally, grade inflation (paradoxically) contributes to higher student stress—because students come to regard anything short of an “A” as akin to failing.
Grade inflation presents a collective action problem. It is in the collective interest of every college to restore grading standards and academic rigor. But individually, each professor, department, and university fears losing students to an easier grader, an easier major, an easier institution.
The key to addressing grade inflation lies in scale: educators across departments, colleges, and universities should collaborate to establish consistent, meaningful grading standards. Several universities have taken meaningful action to restore rigor: Harvard, for example, recently announced a plan to make grading data available to faculty to “guide departmental conversations” on the topic. However, in a time of declining enrollments and budget constraints, academic rigor too often takes a backseat.
A minimally burdensome path toward solving grade inflation is to increase transparency—and education policy professionals have identified several possible strategies for doing so. One strategy, described by Dr. Tom Lindsay calls for listing the class average grades next to students’ grade on their transcripts. I have also suggested reporting the average standardized test scores (e.g., SAT and ACT) by course and department.
Listing course average grades next to student grades would help to lessen the perceived costs of rigorous grading. For example, a student who received a “B+” in a class with a “B” average can fairly claim to have distinguished himself vis-à-vis a student who received an “A-” in a class with an “A-” average.
Standardized test score reporting would help departments—and ideally, universities and university systems—to craft fairer and more precisely calibrated reforms. For example, if Biomedical Engineering awards higher average grades than American Studies, this could be due to differences in average student aptitude rather than differences in grading rigor. Reformers could use average student aptitude scores to assign different GPA or “A” grade caps at the course or department levels. These caps could be adjusted, as needed, to changes in student composition, such as student migration to easier grading courses and majors.
Large-scale, minimally burdensome approaches like these can eventually help to halt and even reverse grade inflation. The pursuit of excellence presupposes that not everyone can be a “winner” or receive the highest grade in the class. However, when educators motivate students to do their best work by setting and maintaining high standards, we benefit students, higher education, and American society as a whole—and, in that sense, everyone wins.
Christopher Schorr is the Director of the Higher Education Reform Initiative at the America First Policy Institute.