The Great Campus Charade

Grades at American universities have been rising for decades, a trend that accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But what happened after that? Using new data collected through the 2023-24 school year, we can see how grades continue to evolve. The Covid spike in grades corrected in the two years immediately after the pandemic, but the drop in grades was short-lived — the decades-long upward trajectory resumed thereafter.

We looked at average grades in all freshman-level undergraduate courses from 2011-12 to 2023-24 at eight large public universities: Kent State University, Missouri State University, Northern Arizona University, Texas A&M University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Missouri at Columbia, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (These institutions post their grade distributions online.) While all of these are large universities, they range from not selective to highly selective, meaning grading in this sample likely reflects university grading more broadly.

Below we graph overall grade trends as well as separate trends in the following fields: business and economics, social sciences and humanities, and math-intensive STEM, which excludes biology.

The overall trend shows steady increases through the 2010s, culminating in a sharp spike in 2020. The average freshman-level course grade rose from just above 3.0 in 2012 (a B) to 3.3 by 2020 (a B+). After corrections in 2021 and 2022, the trend turned upward again in 2023, resuming its pre-pandemic trajectory.

The same pattern — a pandemic spike, followed by a post-pandemic correction and then the resumption of grade inflation — is apparent across fields, with the exception of business and economics, which reverted to its 2016-19 flatter trend. (Still, grades rose rapidly in business and economics in the early 2010s.)

Are students perhaps arriving to college more able to succeed than previously, meaning rising grades should be credited to an uptick in K-12 students’ college preparedness? The evidence suggests the opposite. The chart below shows that performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — often called the “nation’s report card” — has in fact been falling among eighth graders since the mid-2010s. ACT and SAT scores show even steeper declines. More worryingly, the drops in ACT and SAT scores have occurred despite fewer students taking these exams in a test-optional era, something that would normally push averages up. (We would expect stronger students to disproportionately continue to take the tests.)

In short, the data show the academic qualifications of incoming college students are declining even as college grades are rising. It could be that students today are making up the difference by working harder, but this is inconsistent with a well-documented long-term trend of reduced student effort in college, as well as recent and widespread anecdotal evidence. An Atlantic writer described a January report from Harvard’s Classroom Social Compact Committee this way:

Despite this, the average GPA among Harvard’s 2024 graduating class was 3.8. David Laibson, an economics professor and co-chairman of the committee, laid out Harvard students’ issues to The New York Times: “Too often they’re pretending to have done the reading, and consequently the conversation in class is much less productive than it should be … It’s a poor use of everyone’s time, and often there’s one student who basically carries the day.”

The more plausible explanation for rising grades is the simple, straightforward lowering of academic standards.

This is troubling for several reasons. Perhaps the most important reason is that grade inflation undermines student effort. Intuitively, when students expect higher grades, they study less. This means weaker mastery of both course content and the broader skills students develop when under pressure to meet rigorous expectations.

Inflated grades are also problematic because as they rise toward the 4.0 ceiling, grade compression makes it harder for high-achieving students to stand out. As is already happening at Harvard, students increasingly look for other ways to distinguish themselves, such as through extracurriculars or the pursuit of even more education. This is inefficient because it imposes an extra burden on high-performing students that would be unnecessary with a well-functioning grading system.

Grade inflation has even created a new concern: an increasingly large population of students who only get A’s and feel intense pressure to avoid making a single costly mistake in a sea of apparent perfection.

Though grade inflation has been on a persistent upward trajectory for decades, faculty have been mostly quiet about it. Finally, this may be starting to change. In a 2024 Yale Daily News article, Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor, notes “A’s no longer impart any genuinely useful information, whether to the students or to others who might look at the transcripts.” When The Williams Record reported that at Williams College, 76 percent of grades are now in the A range, Luana Maroja, a biology professor, worried about medical students’ ability to perform well on the MCAT: “You need to learn things in order to do well.” Maroja added, “Removing the incentives for learning because everybody’s getting A’s is a problem.”

The political scientist Yascha Mounk recently made a sobering comparison between modern American universities and the Soviet Union:

Individual faculty members who want to maintain rigorous standards may feel that their hands are tied: It is hard to keep standards high when students are unprepared due to lenient prior courses. It is also difficult for individual universities to act. Years ago Princeton University set grading targets for courses to limit the number of A’s and curb grade inflation, but its fellow Ivy League universities did not implement similar policies. Ultimately, Princeton backed down. A key concern was that Princeton students would be at a disadvantage in the job market compared to their peers from other top schools.

Grade inflation is a classic collective-action problem. Stricter standards would benefit the system as a whole, but any institution that acts alone risks harming its own students.

What can be done? There is no simple solution, but in an environment where standards are falling almost everywhere, there is an opportunity for a bold coalition of universities to restore rigor and market themselves to employers accordingly. On a smaller scale, universities can take steps to counterbalance the strong incentives most faculty face to inflate grades. A small step would be for universities to create awards to recognize faculty who maintain rigorous standards. Currently, such teaching awards are one of the many ways universities implicitly reward lax grading, as they are based overwhelmingly on popularity with students.

A more substantial reform would be for universities to report median course grades on student transcripts, giving needed context to students themselves and discerning employers. Transparent reporting may also discourage faculty from giving too high of grades. The student-body presidents of six major universities released a joint letter to the Trump administration over the summer asking it to require all universities that receive Title IV funding to do just that.

Some argue for more radical measures. Mounk, for instance, suggests abolishing grades altogether. He acknowledges this solution is inferior to a grading system that truly distinguishes achievement but argues it is better than what we have now because it does not mislead employers about the usefulness of grades, praise students for mediocre performance, or disincentivize students from taking hard classes. While scrapping grades is neither desirable nor realistic, the appeal of these benefits is a further condemnation of the status quo.

Grade inflation is a difficult problem decades in the making. But by failing to act, universities risk eroding one of their most important assets: the credibility of their own credentials.