Grade inflation

Based on Wikipedia: Grade inflation

The Lake Wobegon Effect Goes to College

Here's a statistic that should make you uncomfortable: at Harvard University, the most frequently awarded grade is an A. Not a B-plus. Not even an A-minus. A straight A.

This isn't because Harvard suddenly started admitting only geniuses who produce flawless work. Something else is happening—something that has been quietly reshaping education for decades, and which carries consequences far beyond any individual transcript.

The phenomenon is called grade inflation, and it works exactly like monetary inflation. When a central bank prints too much money, each dollar becomes worth less. When schools hand out too many high grades, each A becomes worth less too. The currency of academic achievement gets debased.

What Grade Inflation Actually Means

Let's be precise about what we're discussing. Grade inflation isn't simply the observation that students today get higher grades than students did in 1960. That could happen for legitimate reasons—maybe teaching has improved, or students are better prepared, or we've gotten smarter about helping struggling learners succeed.

True grade inflation is something more insidious: it's awarding higher grades for the same quality of work. The student who would have earned a B in 1970 now receives an A for identical performance. The work hasn't changed. Only the label has.

Proving this is tricky, which is partly why the problem persisted so long without decisive action. How do you demonstrate that a literature essay written in 2024 deserves the same grade as one written in 1984? The assignments are different. The professors are different. The cultural context is different.

But we do have ways to check. Standardized tests like the ACT provide a reality anchor. Students can inflate their course grades, but they can't inflate their ACT scores. And here's what the data show: since 2016, more and more students report A averages on their high school transcripts when they register for the ACT. Yet their actual ACT scores have been falling since 2012.

The gap between self-reported grades and demonstrated ability is growing wider.

A Brief History of the A

Grade inflation isn't new. A Harvard committee complained about it back in 1894, grumbling that "Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity." They worried about "insincere students" gaining "passable grades by sham work."

So the impulse toward generosity in grading has deep roots. But the modern era of systematic grade inflation began in the 1960s.

Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired geophysics professor from Duke University, has assembled historical grade data from over 400 four-year colleges, some records stretching back to the 1920s. The patterns he found are striking.

First, a gap opened between public and private institutions starting in the 1950s, with private schools grading more generously. Then came the Vietnam War years, from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, which produced a sharp, widespread rise in grades. The connection isn't subtle—good grades helped students maintain deferments from the draft. Professors who might have given a C suddenly found reasons to award a B.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were relatively stable. Then, from the mid-1980s onward, grades began another slow, steady climb that continues today.

The numbers tell a clear story. From the 1960s onward, grades in American colleges and universities have risen at a rate of 0.15 points per decade on the standard 4.0 scale. That might sound small, but compound it over six decades and you've transformed the entire distribution.

The COVID Accelerant

The pandemic poured rocket fuel on grade inflation. When schools shifted to remote learning in 2020, many adopted more lenient grading policies—pass/fail options, dropped lowest grades, extended deadlines, open-book exams.

Some of this made sense. Students were dealing with unprecedented disruption. Sick family members. Lost jobs. Inadequate internet. A bit of grading flexibility seemed humane.

But the leniency didn't snap back when campuses reopened. The new, gentler standards became the new normal. ACT data show that secondary school grade inflation "sharply accelerated" starting in 2016 and especially during the COVID-19 restrictions. Meanwhile, the National Assessment of Educational Progress—often called "the Nation's Report Card"—has found strong evidence of both grade inflation and declining actual achievement.

Students are getting better grades while learning less.

The Cascade of Consequences

Why does this matter? Isn't a world where everyone gets As a kinder, gentler world?

Consider what grades are supposed to do. At their core, they're a communication system. They tell students how they're performing. They tell employers and graduate schools how candidates compare. They tell parents whether tuition money is being well spent. They even tell professors whether their teaching is working.

When grades become meaningless, all these signals get scrambled.

Start with the brightest students. In a properly functioning system, an A means exceptional work. It's a signal that stands out. But when half the class gets As, the exceptional student becomes invisible. There's no grade left to indicate "this person is genuinely outstanding." The signal compresses. Excellence gets flattened into adequacy.

This creates a perverse incentive. Why put in the extra effort to do exceptional work when mediocre work earns the same grade? Grade inflation reduces the return on intellectual ambition.

Then there's the feedback problem. Grades aren't just rewards—they're information. A B tells a student "you're doing well, but there's room to improve." A C says "you need to work harder or try a different approach." An F screams "something is seriously wrong."

Remove these distinctions and students lose crucial feedback about their own performance. They may graduate believing they've mastered material they barely understand. In most fields, this is merely embarrassing. In fields like medicine or engineering, where specific competencies ensure safety, it can be dangerous.

The effects ripple outward to employers, who can no longer trust transcripts. When everyone has a 3.8 GPA, the GPA tells you nothing. Hiring managers must rely on other signals—internships, work experience, personal connections, the prestige of the institution itself. This disadvantages students from less prominent schools, even if they're equally talented, and advantages students with the resources to accumulate impressive extracurricular credentials.

Grade inflation isn't even uniform across departments, which creates additional distortions. STEM fields tend to grade more rigorously than humanities. A 3.5 GPA in electrical engineering might represent more mastery than a 3.9 in communications—but the transcript doesn't say that. Students rationally migrate toward easier-grading departments, not because those subjects interest them more, but because the grade returns are better.

The Professor's Dilemma

If grade inflation is so damaging, why do professors keep doing it?

Harvey Mansfield, a government professor at Harvard and longtime critic of grade inflation, puts it bluntly: professors give easy grades to be popular. Students fill out course evaluations. Those evaluations affect hiring, tenure, and promotions. Students who receive high grades give higher evaluations. The incentive structure pushes toward leniency.

There's also a prisoners' dilemma at work. Any individual professor who grades rigorously puts their own students at a disadvantage. Those students will have lower GPAs than their peers in more lenient classes. They'll look worse on paper. They may struggle to get into graduate school or land competitive jobs.

Mansfield's solution was characteristically provocative. After learning about Harvard's grade distribution, he announced he would give students two grades: the official one for their transcript, and the one he actually thought they deserved. "I didn't want my students to be punished by being the only ones to suffer for getting an accurate grade," he explained.

The New York Times responded with a satirical "leaked" grading rubric featuring grades like A++ and A+++ "with garlands." The joke landed because it captured something true: the system had become absurd.

Schools That Pushed Back

Not every institution surrendered to grade inflation. Some fought back, with instructive results.

Princeton launched the most famous experiment in 2004. The university established explicit guidelines: A-range grades should constitute 35% of grades in classroom work, and 55% in independent work like senior theses. Departments were expected to enforce these targets.

The policy worked, at least by its own metrics. Before the guidelines, A grades accounted for 47.9% of all undergraduate grades. By 2008-09, that number had fallen below 40% for the first time since the policy began. The humanities showed the biggest shift, dropping from 55.6% As to 44.1%. Engineering fell from 50.2% to 41.7%.

But the experiment also revealed how entrenched grade inflation had become. Natural sciences, which were already near the 35% target, held steady. The real deflation happened in departments that had been grading most generously—suggesting the problem wasn't uniform but concentrated in specific disciplines.

Other schools maintain reputations for rigorous grading. UC Berkeley's College of Engineering caps A grades at 17% of any class and targets average GPAs between 2.7 and 2.9. Saint Anselm College, a small liberal arts school in New Hampshire, has received national attention for its tough standards—the median grade is around 2.5, and the top quarter of the class has only a 3.1 GPA.

The former president of Saint Anselm, Father Jonathan DeFelice, defended the approach with a memorable line: "I cannot speak for everyone, but if I'm headed for the operating room, I will take the surgeon who earned his or her A the honest way."

Wellesley College tried a different approach in 2004, capping average grades at 3.33 per class. Professors could exceed this limit only by filing a written justification. Grades did fall. But so did student evaluations of professors, suggesting students noticed and resented the stricter standards.

Schools That Gave Up

Other institutions responded to grade inflation scrutiny by simply hiding the data.

The University of Alabama provides a cautionary tale. In 2003, the Alabama Scholars Association and its newspaper, the Alabama Observer, published grade distribution data showing that several departments awarded more than 50% As in introductory courses. The Women's Studies department handed out 90% As—the vast majority being A-pluses.

The university president's response? He shut down public access to the Office of Institutional Research records. The problem wasn't solved; it was just made invisible.

The Completion Rate Puzzle

Here's where the story gets complicated. A 2021 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that college completion rates dropped significantly between 1970 and 1990, then steadily improved from 1990 to the present. That sounds like good news—more students finishing their degrees.

But the researchers found something troubling. First-year students today are no better prepared for college than their 1990 counterparts. The quality of college instruction hasn't improved either. So why are more students completing degrees?

The study's conclusion: the most plausible explanation is grade inflation. Students aren't learning more or working harder. They're just failing less because the bar for passing has dropped.

A follow-up 2022 study made the mechanism explicit: grade point average strongly predicts graduation, so when GPAs rise, so do graduation rates. The degrees are real. The learning behind them may be hollow.

The Global Dimension

Grade inflation isn't uniquely American. It's a widespread phenomenon affecting Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Poland, Germany, South Korea, Japan, China, and India. The pressures driving it—student satisfaction metrics, competitive pressure between institutions, reluctance to deliver bad news—exist everywhere education is treated partly as a consumer product.

In England and Wales, debates about grade inflation center on GCSE and A-level examinations. The pattern is similar: steadily rising grades over decades, followed by periodic outcries and reforms, followed by grades rising again.

Interestingly, grade inflation is a specific instance of a broader phenomenon. Anywhere ratings are assigned by humans who have incentives to be generous, inflation tends to occur. Uber drivers have near-perfect ratings because passengers don't want to hurt them. Employee performance reviews skew positive because managers don't want confrontation. Restaurant ratings on Yelp drift upward because who wants to be the grouch who gives two stars?

The common thread is that honesty has costs and generosity feels free—at least in the moment.

What Would Honest Grades Look Like?

Imagine a grading system that actually worked. Grades would spread across the full range, from A to F. An A would mean genuinely exceptional work, earned by perhaps 10-15% of students. A C would be average—respectable, solid, nothing to be ashamed of. An F would mean failure, and would be assigned when failure occurred.

Students would receive clear feedback about their strengths and weaknesses. A B in calculus and a D in literature would tell a student something useful about where their talents lie. Employers could trust transcripts. Graduate schools could compare applicants meaningfully.

This system existed, more or less, within living memory. It could exist again.

But restoring it would require coordinated action. Any school that grades honestly while competitors don't puts its own students at a disadvantage. The incentives are a collective action problem, requiring either external regulation or a critical mass of institutions agreeing to change together.

Some argue the battle is already lost—that employers have simply stopped trusting grades and developed other screening mechanisms. Maybe the new equilibrium is that grades don't matter, and everyone knows they don't matter, and we just maintain the fiction because it's easier than changing.

But there's something sad about that equilibrium. It means students going through the motions of earning grades that everyone knows are meaningless. It means maintaining an elaborate pretense that serves no real purpose. It means a system designed to identify excellence and encourage improvement has become pure theater.

The Deeper Question

Behind the debate about grade inflation lies a more fundamental question: what are grades for?

If grades exist to make students feel good, then inflation is a feature, not a bug. Everyone gets As, everyone feels validated, everyone's happy.

If grades exist to sort students for employers and graduate schools, then inflation is a catastrophic failure. The sorting mechanism has broken down. Other, often less fair mechanisms have taken its place.

If grades exist to provide feedback that helps students learn, then inflation is educational malpractice. It tells students they've succeeded when they haven't. It deprives them of information they need to improve.

The original purpose was probably all three, weighted differently by different people at different times. But you can't optimize for all three simultaneously. Honest feedback will sometimes make students feel bad. Useful sorting will sometimes disadvantage students who worked hard but didn't excel. Validation will sometimes require lying about performance.

Grade inflation represents a choice, even if it was never made explicitly. Institutions chose validation and conflict avoidance over feedback and honest sorting. They chose short-term comfort over long-term usefulness.

The consequences are now visible. But reversing course would require choosing differently—accepting the short-term pain of honest grades for the long-term benefit of grades that actually mean something.

Given the incentives facing individual professors and individual schools, that choice seems unlikely to be made voluntarily. The Lake Wobegon effect will continue. All the students will remain above average, their transcripts glowing with accolades that no one quite believes anymore.