Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities

I went to Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. It's a liberal arts college with about 2,000 students. They explain to all the incoming freshmen (and their parents!) that they don't do grade inflation. An average student is a "C" student. The bookstore sells t-shirts with "C+ Better than Average!"

I believe the cause of this may be the use of student evaluations. Students don't like hard professors, and give them bad evaluations. To some extent, professor's continued employment is dependent on having good evaluations. Hence, grade inflation.<p>In my personal experience, you can lose 20-30% of your evaluation based on hard grading. My reason for believing this? When I was a TA (i.e., "I don't write the tests, but I'll help you pass them"), I got typical evals of about 4.5. When I became a postdoc and started writing my own tests, my evals dropped to about 3. I don't think I became a worse teacher over the course of a single year, so I'm guessing my low evals resulted from not giving out easy tests.<p>(Not to mention several comments on the evals claimed that tests were too hard. I.e., "bad professor, highest grade on midterm was 75 out of 110!")<p>This is an agency problem which is fairly easy to solve: standardize exams and evaluate professor quality based on VAM instead of student opinion.

Although there is clearly a grade inflation, the correlation between student selectivity and average GPA should also be noted:<p>"As a rough rule of thumb, the average GPA of a school today can be estimated by the rejection percentage of its applicant pool:<p>GPA = 2.8 + Rejection Percentage /200 + (if the school is private add 0.2)<p>Non-selective public schools (typically with 15 percent rejection rates or less) with GPAs in the 2.8 range or less tend to have only modest grade inflation. Some have none."

Grade inflation is problematic, but is GPA of any use outside of academia (except for entry-level jobs perhaps)?<p>Perhaps the inflation is a sign that the currency is worthless.

I guess, the main issue is that if half the colleges increase grades, the other half looks bad. Maybe a new measure should exist, like your GPA relative to the school average.

I went to one of the public schools where this data was gathered from. My experience with grade inflation is that it's mostly about money. If a class is deemed hard, students don't want to take it. If students don't take the class, the department can't make any money, and therefore can't pay the bills.<p>That, and a lot of professors just don't care anymore. They don't want to be bothered with teaching, so they just pass everyone without a second thought.

The gap between grade inflation at colleges and universities could represent a gap in the energy, motivation and determination of students to complain about their grades.<p>There's asymmetry between the (nearly limitless) time and energy students have for complaining about their grades versus the (extremely scarce) amount of time professors have for addressing it. This is anecdotal, but I should note that the trendline is inversely proportional to the demands on professors' time over the past few decades.<p>In the MIT chem department one professor's tactic was to have the student evaluations right before dropping the hammer with a tough final exam.

Carnegie Mellon's Average GPA is still a 2.8. Hasn't changed in a long time.<p>One thing I have noticed and could be interesting though - is it possible that students are getting better at the material over time?<p>I'm a TA so I have access to exams from past years. It is most definitely the case the exams just keep getting harder. Exams from 5 years ago are complete jokes in comparison to exams these days, but students seem to be keeping up. It may be that they are just exposed to the material before college now. Any comments?

I also notice that masters and phds were much harder to find when I graduated from college, about 20 years ago.<p>I wonder if those became easier to earn or if this is the result of a graduation arms race.

There is an interesting chapter in _Excellence Without a Soul_ by Harry Lewis, suggesting that garde inflation is less a problem that widely believed. You could look it up.

Anybody know of any studies correlating GPA with job performance or whatever GPA is supposed to be useful for?

I wonder how much these changes correlate to funding.

ok i'll bite ... the y axis starts at 2.6, not 0, which visually exaggerates the differences. regardless of the merits of this analysis, this graph is disingenuous