Witness what recently happened at Princeton as an example of this kind of change. Princeton will officially be ending its experiment in grade deflation. Most of the endless discussion that began before I set foot on campus centered on claims that the specific way grade deflation was implemented was not fair. Fair seems like an awfully subjective standard, and indeed, the faculty committee that recommended an end to the policy put a great deal of stock in students subjective and frequently, wrong perceptions of the policy. July 7, 2016 update: Added some Canadian schools and updated data for three four-year American schools. While local increases in student quality may account for part of the grade rises seen at some institutions, the national trend cannot be explained by this influence. The uncertainty has increased students' anxiety about grades, and many believe that grade deflation is unfair because it ignores the uniqueness of one's work. Grade deflation - University of Chicago - College Confidential Forums Yes its a ridiculous system. The report authors note that most of the things that would otherwise influence graduation rates, are negative. For CAS freshmen, those scores jumped from 1119 to 1315 over those same years (a mid 1990s SAT recentering accounts for a portion of these increases). It discourages college students from taking a cutthroat, aggressive attitude towards their peers and their academics, and lessens the incentive for academic dishonesty. I call this period of grade inflation the student as consumer era or the consumer era for short. Outside of higher education, this report may win you bet or help you win an argument. But both faculty and administrators dismiss these stories as individual professors being too timid to stand up for their own standards. The average GPA change since 2000 at both public and private schools is 0.10 points per decade, but the range is wide. The influence of affirmative action is sometimes used to explain consumer era grade inflation. For instance, in one large introductory psychology class, 82 percent of one section earned A grades while another could manage only 15 percent. View of large group of students as they take an, exam in a lecture hall at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, January 28, 1964. As with all such research, replication and verification will be important this is still a working paper. Institutions comprising this average were chosen strictly because they have either published grade data or have sent recent data (2012 or newer) to the author covering a span of at least eleven years. If you want to go all-in and bet on one thing to help your career prospects after college, its extremely wise to have that one thing not be your GPA. The term "grade deflation" implies that grades go down as time goes on, while "suppression" simply implies that grades are low compared to other institutions. As well go over later, an inflated GPA isnt always the best to have (yes, even though it may be ridiculously high), and inflation should definitely not be one of your top must-haves when considering a college. For the rest of this article, well use grade deflation in this sense since very few colleges actually actively grade deflate. The corresponding article stated that the cum laude cutoff for the class of 2017 was a 3.80, which indicated that 30 percent of students graduated with this or a higher GPA.
