‘Every five years or so, I crunch the numbers on college grades across the US and report what I’ve found,’ writes Stuart Rojstaczer modestly on his website.  

What Rojstaczer, a former professor, has found is that grades are going up, and have been going up for quite some time. Until the 1960s, only around 20% of grades awarded at US colleges were As. The most common grade was a C.  

During the Vietnam War, grades moved up across the board as professors tried to save young men from the draft by keeping them from failing out of college. After a brief downturn in the early 80s, grades started rising again. Just before the turn of the millennium, As became the most common grade at US universities, and now look likely to exceed half of all grades in the not-too-distant future. 

Grade rises of this nature aren’t unique to US universities. In England, the percentage of first-class degrees rose from 8% in 1996-1997 to 36% in 2020-2021, more than quadrupling in less than a quarter of a century.  

At a selection of Canadian universities, meanwhile, the percentage of A grades increased from 16% in 1973-1974 to 21% in 1993-1994. And a recent study at the University of Sydney revealed that the percentage of high distinctions awarded there increased from 8% to 26% between 2011 and 2021, more than tripling in a decade.
 
Grade rises in themselves could be a good sign if we had reason to believe that they were simply tracking improvements in student performance. Unfortunately, researchers have learned to test for that possibility, and in most cases, they’ve found that better performance can’t explain the full extent of the grade rises that have occurred. Grade rises that can’t be explained by student performance constitute ‘grade inflation.’  

Like monetary inflation, grade inflation has costs. Bright, hard-working students struggle to signal how well they’ve done to employers, who are faced with piles of CVs from students with impeccable academic records. Less motivated students, for their part, have very little reason to up their game, since they are likely to get good grades (or at least passes) whatever they do.  

Is grade inflation a problem at New Zealand universities? It is. And that will be the subject of my next Insights column, which will summarise the findings of our upcoming report on the topic.