A grade of a C once meant average, a B above average and an A excellent, but data shows in the last 40 years that University students have increasingly made higher grades.
The percentage of freshmen entering the University with a high school GPA between 3.0 and 4.0 rose from about 58 percent to 88 percent between 1998 and 2013.
Former Duke University professor Stuart Rojstaczer completed a study showing the trends in university grades over the last century, which showed a steady increase in As received by students in the last 30 years, according to Education Portal.
Odgen Honors College Dean Jonathan Earle said there are a number of contributors to the increase in high grades. The University has higher admissions standards, accepts a wider variety of students and graduates have more competition as they are leaving school.
The nature of colleges has also changed over the last several decades, most dramatically in the last 35 years, Earle said. Part of the start of the trend may have been driven by the draft during the Vietnam war. If a student failed out of school during those years they lost their academic deferment — giving a student an F could mean sending them to war.
“Before that, grades were pretty stable, and many college classes graded on a bell curve, with Cs in the middle,” Earle said. “Students who didn’t work very hard received what was known as the ‘gentleman’s C;’ these days that same student might well flunk or be encouraged to work harder.”
Earle said colleges were not necessarily places for high academic achievers but places where the nation’s elite were prepared for adulthood. Now there is more diversity and competition, which drives test scores up.
The universities with the highest inflation are the ones who are the most prominent in the public eye, Ivy League schools and state schools. Earle said these schools are pressured to produce successful students.
“More As are received at Yale than any other University,” Earle said. “But I don’t have a problem with giving a student a high grade if they are working hard and meeting
expectations.”
Political science professor James Garand said in an email another factor of the inflation of grades is the idea of students as consumers of education who are paying for a type of service or product.
This puts pressure on professors to give higher grades to students. There is also pressure because teaching evaluations are one of the only ways professors are evaluated, Garand said. Bad grades for students could mean poor evaluations for professors.
“Most professors have stories in which a student will say something like, ‘I am paying your salary with my tuition dollars,’ implying that professors should give students the high grades for which they are paying,” Garand said.
University Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope said the reasons for grade inflation perpetuate themselves, which can be dangerous for academia as a whole.
This “grade mania” can be psychologically harmful to students, Cope said. As the level of what is acceptable rises so does the pressure, on students to obtain perfection.
Students aren’t the only ones under pressure though, Cope said. The pressure reaches professors because grades have been instrumentalized. A student’s grades are more than a means to a degree—they are the keys to various gates after college.
Earle said when he is looking over students’ graduate school applications GPA is the most important criterion because it shows a student’s work over time. However the window is smaller, GPAs like a 3.7 and 3.89s are compared in today’s time when in the past there was a larger range.
“It becomes a tool rather than an evaluation, and when it becomes instrumentalized it becomes personal,” Cope said. “The narrower the entry gate the higher the pressure.”
However, if all students are making better grades, and the window of what is accepted for postgraduate institutions grows smaller, then there will be an increased pressure on professors to administer higher grades. Over time this causes the system to lose credibility, Cope said.