The key question: What are we measuring?
November 11, 2025
Grade inflation has long been a problem in higher education. I taught my first college classes in 1981. It was a concern then and remained so throughout my career. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education demonstrates that the problem persists and has worsened in recent years. In first-year classes at eight representative universities, the average grade has moved to a B+.
Minnesota, unsurprisingly, is not immune. Data from the University of Minnesota indicates that across all of its campuses and classes, grades are inflated. A summary of average grades in 100-level through 500-level classes in 2023-24 reveals the lowest average is a B and in many cases the average is a B+ or an A-. This pattern is no doubt true across the Minnesota State system too. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that, as the Chronicle demonstrates, high school students are less prepared for college than their predecessors — and they study less once they get there.
Numerous incentives exist to encourage high grades.
Administrators want better graduation rates, and higher grades ensure that students will move through their college careers more quickly and successfully.
Academic departments want more students, especially when low enrollment numbers might portend their elimination. No one factor makes a department popular, but students learn from their peers about the difficulty of classes and the grades they receive, and that influences the majors they choose.
Faculty want good evaluations and they know students who receive high grades are more likely to give them.
But perhaps the biggest incentive is that students want high grades because they see them as the ticket to lucrative employment. And since we have told them time and again that they are consumers in the education market, they do not hesitate to demand what they believe they have paid for. Their demands are often misguided, but just as often sincere. A student who had received a B on an assignment once visited my office and asked what she had done wrong. She assumed the default was an A and every gradation lower than that indicated a deficiency. My assumption, I told her, is that a C means you have met the basic requirements and anything higher indicates degrees of excellence beyond those requirements.
That conversation helped me realize that whether high grades constitute a problem depends on what they signify.
One view — prevalent in our current age of assessment — is that grades measure whether students meet learning objectives. In this view all students might earn As. One might earn that grade on a first try at an assignment and another after three attempts. Inflated grades are not a problem because they indicate that more students met course objectives.
But the most common view is that grades compare students to one another. Faculty thus strive to disperse grades in a bell curve, so the majority get Cs, a few get As and Fs, and those interspersed between the average and the extremes get Bs and Ds. In this view inflated grades are a problem because they fail to distinguish between excellence, mediocrity and failure. If the average grade is an A-, what does a B mean?
When we look at transcripts or at GPAs, we can’t tell which view applies to which grades. But in either case, our responses to grade inflation depend on what we think grades mean.
But there’s a way to create a shared conception of what grades mean that will incentivize all parties — even students — to seek to eliminate, or at least reduce, grade inflation.
The solution is simple and expedient: Minnesota’s universities and colleges should mandate that transcripts report both the student’s grade and the average grade received in each class. This would make evident the degree to which faculty inflate grades. A bell curve is not necessary — a class in which a lot of students earn As is possible — but teachers should distinguish between those who do and do not meet requirements and between different degrees of excellence.
It would also make evident the relationship between a student’s grade and the rest of the class. Students would then want the average grade to be a C, because anyone looking at a transcript could readily tell if a student’s A was actually the class average. When students themselves demand rigorous evaluation, inflated grades will be of little concern.
I loved my work with students. I hated assigning grades. But they are, for good or ill, baked into higher education.
We should do what’s necessary (and, in this case, easy) to make them meaningful.
The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..