I teach at an Ivy League university. I can’t count how many colleagues have told me that they “just give everyone an A.”
This mindset doesn’t belong to just one instructor, department, discipline, or generation. I do not “out” any one or two particular people when I describe my experience with grade inflation. It’s happening everywhere, and some instructors even boast of the practice.
At best, grade inflation robs students of their education. At worst, it has outsized, negative consequences for students once they graduate, most especially for those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. Graduates with money and well-connected families can cope with the burden of a mediocre reputation. Graduates whose futures depend entirely on their merit and perceived potential? We’ve set them back with the very degree we promised would put them ahead in life.
We know what happens when the public believes some applicants are less capable than others. Affirmative action, irrespective of one’s opinion about its efficacy or necessity, never escaped the popular opinion that it “mismatched” underqualified applicants to selective colleges. Some black and Latino students have wondered whether they were admitted based on their merit or merely because of their skin color. The insecurity generated by perpetuating a system of reduced merit not only belittles the students in question but also leads to an expectation from professors—and prospective employers—that these students cannot perform up to standard. Likewise, grade inflation is a practice that would seem to advance equity or even “decolonize” the classroom, yet the ultimate effect is undermining student achievement. Recent graduates’ reputations for competence are tarnished when their academic proficiency is questioned.
This pessimism is not unwarranted.
A recent survey shows that nearly 40 percent of respondent employers avoid hiring recent college graduates, whom they suspect are unprepared for professional life. American companies are increasingly hiring based on applicant skills and dropping minimum degree requirements. Frustrated young workers are going viral on TikTok, realizing in real time that the implicit promise of high-paying employment upon graduation doesn’t align with their frustrating reality. Since 2020, hiring rates for any applicant with a bachelor’s degree or higher have dipped, whereas those without a bachelor’s are finding jobs at a higher rate than their more educated counterparts. Perhaps the most counterintuitive hiring trend of all is the advice for applicants to leave their GPAs off of their resumes. A number of employers are questioning the validity of associating high GPAs with professional competency.
In sum, college degrees have become increasingly less attractive to employers, and even graduates with high GPAs—whom we might expect to defy this negative hiring trend—are advised to downplay their grades in order to become more hirable. Grade inflation, in general, hinders students from becoming competitive professional applicants or at least coming across as such.
Some graduates can overcome the challenges brought on by grade inflation. These graduates, however, are not the ones we typically think of as needing any extra help. Those with advantageous social networks remain competitive in the job market by virtue of their connections, which are often inherited. Those with fewer connections and likely a lower socioeconomic status can, in theory, still take advantage of their academic achievements and subsequently build their own professional networks. Yet due to the open secret that today’s graduates are under-prepared despite—and perhaps because of—their high grades, students who depend on their own merit are at a loss. If the value of academic achievement is known to be inflated across academia, then our least privileged students won’t be able to fall back even on their own accomplishments.
We need realistic solutions to grade inflation, which will benefit the students most harmed by this practice. Speaking from experience, berating individual instructors will not work en masse. If presented with the option to give an A or risk their jobs, instructors with employment precarity who do the majority of teaching at American colleges and universities will likely choose the former. Departments, especially faculty with tenure, must determine by what standards student work will be evaluated. Deans and department heads must provide their teaching faculty with administrative support in case of blowback over grading, and the line must be held. Course evaluations by students should not be interpreted as reliable markers of instructors’ competencies, given the noted correlation between positive course evaluations and students’ satisfaction with their anticipated grades. Undoing the damage of grade inflation can only happen if administrators and department heads collectively hold the line on fair grading based on honest assessments of students’ work.
We cannot afford to repeat the affirmative action debacle, which had a dubious effect on advancing equality and earned the American university system even more disapproval from the public. Grade inflation not only compromises student learning and tarnishes graduates’ reputation for competence but also sabotages the academic enterprise as a whole. Academia’s reputation hangs in the balance, and the grading choices made by instructors will either restore its integrity or further erode it. Our students’ futures, especially those disadvantaged and relying more on their merit to advance socioeconomically, are at stake. Administrators and tenured faculty must address the grade inflation problem to restore our reputation. If we can make grading meaningful and fair, we can show our students, prospective employers, and the American public that a college education still has value.
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There is one more level of damage, that I think is the most nefarious. Cultures vary – some cultures value learning for the sake of learning, while others value learning for the sake of credentials. Coming from South America my cultural background leans towards the latter – cheating was not discouraged as long as you were not tainted by it (not caught). The almost guarantee of an “A” now, discourages some of us from trying hard, since our credentials will be high no matter what. We can thus pursue other more urgent or pleasurable goals. Therefore those coming from cultures that value learning might continue to study and learn, whreas those of us coming from cultures that value the “A” will be left behind. The loss of learning will not be equal, Asians and Europeans, who have historically valued learning more, will suffer less from the loss of learning/studying pressure.
Well, I of course wholeheartedly agree with the author. Grade inflation is a) rampant, b) damaging the reputation and value of higher ed, and c) counterproductive, especially for good students from underrepresented minorities, and those with low SES backgrounds. The problem is that even though most people I speak to are fed up with the grade inflation, it is nearly impossible to do something about it. If everybody gets As, and I give my student a realistic grade, say a B, my student, even though she might be much more competent than the A students from other universities, will still have a disadvantage on the job market. I can’t punish my students for the presence of grade inflation, and since everyone else has this problem too, the only ways to stop grade inflation are either just give everyone a class ranking instead of a grade (but that’s unfair if the class happens to be filled with lots of good students), or have centralized and externally managed exams. Hand-wringing and complaining alone is not going to solve this problem.
Retired prof. emeritus in the humanities.
The proposed solution is a necessary part of the rescue, especially the claim that administration must support grade decisions in the inevitable howling about a bad grad that always occurs. But even an institution-wide policy of grade validity will fail as not every college will abide by those limits.
A good reason why employers are no longer hiring top grads or even those without Baccalaureate degrees is that more often than not those grads come with an entitled attitude, while the lesser accomplished candidates are willing to work to “overcome a perceived deficit.” This is the inevitable result of grade inflation, which at first seems like a form of compassion, but in the end is one of the most efficient ways to destroy an institution.
At a college where I once taught the grade inflation was so bad that the dean visited our department and implored us to just give a B now and again. For summa cum laude, they had to calculate the GPA out four numbers past the decimal point. You might expect those with tenure to dial it back; but no, they get worse because now they are immune to the criticism. They want students and graders, so they just max out their grading even more.
In my university, a mid-level state “flagship,” the median grade in intro science courses like math and chemistry seems to be in the C+/B- range. This does not sound like what’s going on in the Ivy League.
Since so many colleges have lowered standards by no longer requiring applicants to submit ACT/SAT scores, maybe to be really “progressive,” we can get rid of grades altogether or let students assign themselves a grade. What could go wrong?
Just defend this in the name of “equity.”