Higher Education’s Grade Inflation Conundrum

Grade inflation is all the rage in higher education.

Harvard has a proposal to reduce the number of A’s it awards. A Yale faculty committee proposed that 3.0 should be the mean grade.

But all these solutions suffer from the same problem: zero-sum thinking. That is, for every winner there must be a loser.

Here’s the rub: traditional higher education doesn’t seem to have an obvious set of alternative answers for this problem compared to their K-12 or more innovative counterparts.

Let me explain.

First, the evidence does suggest that there is a grade inflation problem in higher education. Students do less work than in the past, in some cases seem less prepared than past generations of students were for higher education, and yet grades have gone up.

The dominant answer we’ve seen so far from colleges is essentially to curb the number of high grades they give by introducing various forms of grading curves.

But, as some students have observed, that penalizes the student who may have demonstrated mastery of the course concepts—and yet because of the forced curve, finds themselves on the short end of the stick, as professors must pit the students against each other as a sorting mechanism rather than judge whether students exhibited mastery against the course’s competencies.