Grade Inflation

Colleges across the country have widely inflated their grades, yet many faculty members and administrators avoid confronting the issue. Valen Johnson examines the reasons behind this reluctance and challenges several common assumptions about how college grading works.

The book draws on historical research and on a year-long online course evaluation experiment run at Duke University during 1998 and 1999. It studies how grading affects different parts of the educational process and how that, in turn, shapes the behavior of students and instructors.

Johnson concludes that an instructor's grading practices strongly influence end-of-course teaching evaluations. He also finds that students' expectations about grading affect which courses they choose, a pattern that hurts enrollment in the natural sciences and mathematics. Together these forces give professors a reason to hand out high grades and students a reason to seek out those professors, and grade inflation follows from this incentive system. The work is aimed at people working to reform higher education and at those who must navigate it. Johnson is a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan and previously taught statistics and decision sciences at Duke, where the data was collected. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.