What new data says about grade inflation at a handful of public universities, including NAU

Harvard officials last month released a report saying the school’s system of evaluating students is “failing to perform the key functions of grading,” and that too many students are getting too many A’s.

New research finds college freshmen are getting better grades, but they’re also scoring lower on university entrance metrics like the ACT and SAT. The data come from eight public universities, including Northern Arizona University, between the 2011-12 school year and the 2023-24 school year.

The average freshman GPA rose from a 3.0 in 2012 to a 3.3 in 2023. ACT scores, meanwhile, went from a 21.1 in 2012 to a 19.5 in 2023.

And for Cory Koedel, that can only mean one thing: grade inflation. Koedel is a professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Missouri who worked on the study.

He spoke with The Show and began with what he makes of the fact that at the schools he looked at, he found GPAs going up while SAT and ACT scores were going down.

Full conversation

Cory Koedel

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Handout

CORY KOEDEL: I think it concerns me because I worry that we're not teaching students as much as we should be and we've become very credentials focused, but the credentials don't have to mean the same thing over time, and I'm worried that they're meaning less and less.

MARK BRODIE: Is this, do you think, an academic problem? Is it sort of a jobs and outside of school problem? Is it some combination of those things? 

KOEDEL: I think it's both, but ultimately, I worry about it for jobs outside of school. I mean, school has a lot of limitations, and we can all think of classes where it probably wasn't a great use of our time, but there's really strong evidence in totality that the more you learn in school, the more you're able to succeed in the labor market. And so I'm worried that we're taking away from that learning.

BRODIE: I guess my question was more of like, is part of the reason this might be happening that postgraduate jobs require certain credentials or you don't even get an interview if your GPA is lower than a certain threshold? 

So I wonder if maybe the better way to phrase this is that our universities may be responding to what they're seeing in the job market as opposed to just sort of doing this on their own?

KOEDEL: That's an interesting question. My gut tells me it's not mostly about that. It's about individuals in the education system having trouble holding standards and giving people bad news, like students when they don't do well.

I do think the labor market, the problem I think there is that the employers aren't focusing hard enough on the process by which grades are made, and they are looking at transcripts and degrees when these things are meaning less and less.

BRODIE: So your research looked at eight public universities. How much do you think we can extrapolate out from those schools to look at sort of the broader system of higher education in this country? 

KOEDEL: So that's a good question. And I, you know, it is only eight universities. It's eight really big universities, and they have a lot of differences in selectivity, so it's a good spread.

I think our evidence alone might raise that kind of question, but there's also lots of other data points out there about grade inflation happening in lots of different institutions that are not in our data set. So I do feel pretty comfortable that what we're seeing is a very broad trend across most higher education institutions.

BRODIE: Do you think it's really just as simple as professors not wanting to give students bad grades? 

KOEDEL: Yeah, I guess the simple part's tricky. There's a lot of incentives in the system to give good grades. So the students want good grades, and if you give them good grades, they won't bother you as much. They won't come to your office hours and take your time and ask you lots of questions. Their parents seem to like it better. The dean's office likes it because there's no student complaints and the students are happy.

And just on a personal level, it's hard to give people bad news. I mean, there's all kinds of evidence in like the management literature and in psychology about how much trouble managers have giving, say, their workers bad news, but the same kind of dynamic applies in a classroom. And so I think everything is tilting toward giving good grades. And there's not really anything in the system that's incentivizing maintaining standards.

BRODIE: So what would have to change to create those incentives to have instructors give students the grades that they're actually earning as opposed to just giving everybody maybe a better grade than what they should have? 

KOEDEL: So this is the million dollar question. This is extremely difficult. So I will say as a professor myself, It is very difficult for me to meaningfully buck the trend, to give a really hard class when all the other classes aren't as hard. I feel like I'm punishing my students. I feel like they're not prepared. The whole thing is a real struggle.

I think there's a couple of things that can be done. One simple suggestion I've heard that appeals to me greatly is if universities started publishing the median grade in a class on the transcript right next to the student's own grade.

And I think then at least students would see that when they get an A and everyone else got an A, it's not so impressive, and that information will be available to employers. And I think even that little bit of transparency might help professors hold the standard a little bit more.

BRODIE: How much of a culture shift do you think it would take to sort of reverse this trend within universities? 

KOEDEL: I think it would take a massive cultural shift.

BRODIE: Is that something that you think your colleagues are up for or interested in?

KOEDEL: Well, like a lot of shifts like that, I don't think people can just do it because they want to, or we decide we think we should. I don't think anything would happen there.

I do think policies could change it, like reporting the grades on the transcripts could change everyone's behavior. Even if people want to do things a certain way, they will feel maybe embarrassed or something. I think universities could give awards to faculty who maintain high standards.

Things like this, they could change how we behave. But I think to expect us to just kind of shift our behavior because we all, or some of us, think it's a bad idea, I think it's not really going to happen.

BRODIE: I would imagine this would also require somewhat of a culture shift on the part of students and their parents, right, to expect that, you know, the grading might be a little bit harder?

KOEDEL: Sure, sure. I think that that would be true, but I also feel like students will adjust to what, you know, the faculty and institutions do.

BRODIE: Is there something to be said about, at least in certain classes, that grading maybe is a little subjective? And like when you talk about standards, I would think in some disciplines it might be easier to sort of grade those standards or judge those standards than in others. 

KOEDEL: Yeah, that's certainly an issue. So there's been some interesting research on fields where, you know, the types of questions that get asked have a very clear right or wrong answer. So think like engineering or something versus fields where the types of exercises you do.

So like in teacher education, you might prep a lesson plan. And it's a lot harder to objectively grade that assessment. And you do see in classes where there's not as many right and wrong answers, grades are inflated.

BRODIE: Well, so you are, of course, a university professor. So I have to ask, like, what how do you think about this when you are grading your students assignments or papers or tests? Like, how do you think about what kinds of grades they're getting and how that sort of fits into the, you know, where the median grade of your class might end up?

KOEDEL: I do worry about it. I think I'm one of the harder grading professors on campus. I've been a professor since 2007, so I've been doing this a while and the approach I've taken is I teach an upper division economics course and I have not changed the standards of that course while I've been teaching.

And more recently, that has started to become a big problem because the students are really having trouble meeting those standards. I don't think it's 'cause the students are dumber or anything like that. I just think they're not being prepared as well as they used to be prepared.

But I also don't think it's fair to all the students who've taken my class over the years for me to give the current group you know, an easier course. And so it has been hard. I do think about it, but I have maintained my standards.