An “A” isn’t what it used to be, according to an Inside Higher Ed article last week, “Grades on the Rise.” At private universities all around the country, more and more students are getting As and are graduating with higher GPAs.
According to Stuart Rojstaczer, former Duke University professor and founder of Gradeinflation.com, and Christopher Healy, an associate professor at Furman University, the national mean GPA at a collection of universities has risen about 0.1 points each decade, starting in the 1960s (with an exception of the 1970s). Mean GPA in the 1950s was 2.52; in 2007 it had risen to 3.11.
Rojstaczer and Healy offer a few explanations for grade inflation. One is that college administrators want their students to do well, to get into top grad schools and to secure good jobs. Another reason is the “pervasive use of teacher evaluation forms.” You can tell a teacher all you want that there’s no connection between grading and a student’s opinion of a professor, but in the end, the proof is in the pudding—professors who grade more leniently get more positive evaluations. A third explanation relates to student expectations: When a student purchases a rather expensive education at a top university, he or she will expect to get the highest return on investment—a C average at Harvard (a rare, but possible circumstance) is no where nearly as valuable as an A average. Admins don’t want unhappy customers.
Other data from Rojstaczer and Healy’s study shows that:
- GPAs at private institutions are on average about 0.1 points higher that at public institutions among students with identical SAT scores at each.
- GPAs at private institutions are on average about 0.2 points higher than at public institutions among students who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class and had a high school GPA of at least 3.75.
- Students who major in the humanities or social sciences have higher GPAs that engineer majors.
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