A Is for Average

Twenty-five years ago, Duke University graduates needed a 3.63 GPA to earn cum laude honors for finishing in the top 25% of their class. This year, they required near perfection: a 3.89 for students in the engineering school and 3.95 for those in the college of arts and sciences.

The Blue Devils are far from alone. Students in Wake Forest University’s class of 2026 needed a 3.8 to be in the top 30%, and those at Davidson College needed a 3.86 to be in the top quarter. The median GPA for this year’s Davidson graduates was 3.72, equivalent to an A-minus.

At many schools, earning an A is, quite literally, average. But in the eyes of many faculty, administrators, and policymakers, that is not a sign of success.

Some universities across the country have found that incoming students are unprepared for college, provoking worries that rising grades are a sign students are being passed along without truly learning. “Administrators won’t acknowledge students can’t do the work,” the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in March. 

Conservatives in particular have taken up the fight. “Grade inflation at America’s universities is a national scandal,” the right-leaning Martin Center for Academic Renewal said last year. The Raleigh organization’s president, Jenna Robinson, blamed it on lowered educational standards and the “idea that everybody gets a trophy.” 

Now the Trump administration has entered the fray. In the “national call to action” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon released earlier this month, she pushed universities to publicize their plans to combat grade inflation.

“High academic standards are essential because rigor and learning go hand-in-hand, equipping students with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in life and contribute to their country and community,” she wrote.

But for all the attention the subject has received, there’s little consensus among policy experts and academics about the causes of grade inflation, and thus how to solve the problem—or if it even is a problem.

The Long View

This is far from the first time grade inflation has become a national emergency. A Harvard University committee rang the alarm about A’s being given out too easily way back in 1894. But the problem has been called a myth for nearly as long.

At this point, most academics agree that the median grade began to rise during the Vietnam War. Male students whose GPAs dipped too low were at risk of being drafted, Victor Strandberg, a Duke English professor for 60 years, told The Assembly in April. “That put pressure on the grading scale,” he said.

What’s happened since has been a matter of continual debate. Clifford Adelman, a U.S. Department of Education researcher, marshalled data in 1995 to argue grade inflation didn’t exist. “Contrary to the widespread lamentations, grades actually declined slightly in the last two decades,” he wrote in The New York Times.

In The Washington Post eight years later, then-Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer came to the opposite conclusion. One quarter of students received a C at Duke in 1969, he found; as he was writing in 2003, it shrank to less than one tenth. Rojstaczer hadn’t personally awarded anyone a C in two years, he wrote. 

He also found grade information for a couple dozen schools, which he compiled at the aptly named gradeinflation.com, and maintained it through 2016. He found that A’s had become the most common grade given across the nation by the early 2000s.

“Every time I collected this data, I would say, ‘Okay, now it’s going to end—we’re going to get a plateau here,’” Rojstaczer told The Assembly. “And every year, I would disappoint myself. And I got tired. I got essentially bludgeoned, and once my sense of wonder about it continuing to go up ceased, then it was no longer a fun game.”

While Duke and other selective colleges stand out for their sky-high grades, the trend Rojstaczer found has become visible across national datasets. The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study shows that the median college GPA increased from 3.01 in 2012 to 3.28 in 2020.

But the fact that averages are increasing isn’t the actual problem. To put it in financial terms, increasing net worths could mean that money is worth less. Or it could mean everyone is getting richer. Similarly, more students earning A’s could show that an A doesn’t mean what it once did, or it could indicate that today’s students are outperforming those of the past.

Jeffrey Denning, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, tried to figure out which was the case in a 2022 paper. Using detailed data from 2001 to 2012 at a single public liberal arts college, he and his coauthors compared course grades to grades on final exams, looking specifically at two courses that used the same exam throughout the period. Denning found course grades increased while test scores stayed the same.

Skeptics are quick to note that a study about two classes at a single college is hardly generalizable to the whole country, however. 

“It’s all noise, no data,” Kevin Gannon, director of Queens University’s Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence, said on a May episode of the American Campus Podcast about the general issue. “The grade inflation argument basically comes down to vibes, and vibes-based research should not be dictating policy.”

Every class, every department, every college has different curricula and grading policies, and those change constantly. Without something widespread and static to measure them against, there isn’t an objective way to determine whether increasing grades result from better performance or lower standards.

Denning argues that the magnitude of inflation is so high that easier grading is the only real explanation.

“The amount of learning that would have to have gone on in the last 10, 15, 20 years to explain the increasing grades—it would represent a huge leap in our ability to teach students. I think that’s not super likely,” he said.

But Gannon and other pedagogy experts point to their own evidence that grades aren’t a useful measure of learning in the first place.

“There is a wide body of research that shows what a lot of us suspected already: There is not a correlation between high grades and meaningful learning,” Gannon said on the podcast. 

The real question, then, is not whether students did well enough at a point in time to earn an A, but whether they mastered the skills and material for the long run. 

Hypotheses and Solutions

In industry argot, the effort to meet that goal is called “student success,” and colleges have spent decades investing in it.

“We’re 25 years into the student success movement in higher education, where there has been a lot of really good, really necessary focus on student success,” said Kevin McClure, a UNC Wilmington professor and author of The Caring University. “And it has meant that there is more attention on retention and completion than ever before.”

While Denning ruled out increased instructional resources as an explanation for rising GPAs—in his sample, average class size grew and instructional expenditures per student shrank—he did not investigate all of the investments colleges have made outside the classroom. Improved evaluations, professionalized advising staff, tutoring centers, mentorship programs: Students today have resources to improve their learning and performance that earlier generations lacked.

“I would attribute our growth in student GPA to the exact opposite of what grade inflation suggests,” said Andrew Daire, provost at North Carolina A&T State University, where the median GPA increased from 2.91 to 3.06 between 2018 and 2025. “At N.C. A&T, our faculty and student success professionals have intentionally created a culture of excellence, innovation, and support that empowers students to achieve at higher levels.”

Universities are also judged on student success goals. Many states, including the UNC System, provide financial incentives or penalties based on whether institutions hit their benchmarks for retention—the percentage of students who stay enrolled from one year to the next—and four-year graduation rates.

But while that financial structure pushes colleges to invest in helping students learn, it also motivates them to grade easily. The problem is amplified by cost-conscious families who want to ensure they get their tuition money’s worth, especially if they’ve taken on debt.

“Financially speaking, when students are investing so much in this, there’s reason for institutions to want to get them to the finish line by any means necessary,” McClure said. “Even if the student is not doing everything that they should to be successful.”

Rojstaczer labels the current period of higher education, starting in the 1980s, as the “student as consumer era.” In acting like businesses, universities are pushed to act less like academic or moral authorities and more like marketers.

“They’re buying a luxury item,” Rojstaczer said, “like a Mercedes or a fancy condo in Manhattan. Okay, obviously, condos in Manhattan cost more. And they feel like they should get something in exchange for that luxury item, and that they want that luxury item to give them a leg up in terms of getting a great job, making a lot of money, getting the connections to make a lot of money.”

Faculty members feel the same pressure.

“No department head or dean will compliment me on my high standards,” journalist and Duke professor Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times in July. “No formula will interpret and adjust my course evaluations for how generous or stingy I was with A’s. My courses will be less appealing. And school administrators generally prefer professors who attract students to professors who repel them.”

There’s a wide body of evidence showing that student evaluations of professors decrease as grading standards get tougher. Doubters need only scan comments on Rate My Professors, a website as popular with students as it is lamented by faculty—especially those on short-term contracts. A few rumors of too-tough exams could lead enough students to ignore the class that it gets canceled, and a semester’s worth of pay along with it.

But students face their own harms from the normalization of sky-high GPAs. Anxiety, depression, and perfectionism are common among today’s college students. The spring 2024 National College Health Assessment found that more than a third of all undergraduates had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and nearly three-quarters discussed anxiety with a health care provider in the past year.

Wendy Murphy, then chair of the UNC Board of Governors, was so concerned with “achievement culture” after a spate of suicides at NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill that she called for reforms last year. Deflating grades could take some of that perfectionist pressure off. Scholars and policymakers also frequently argue that maintaining a perfect GPA at all costs can lead students to avoid academic risks, like taking a difficult class in a new subject, that may have substantial learning benefits. 

“In some cases, grades become this microcosm of these bigger anxieties that students have about themselves and about the future,” McClure said. “I think a worthwhile project on every campus would be creating some sort of opportunity for us to collectively have a conversation about what those norms are around grades, what grades mean, and what they don’t mean.”

He is not the first to propose the idea. In fact, it was one of the principles UNC-CH’s Education Policy Committee said should guide grading reforms in a report written in 2000. The committee’s proposals included aiming for a median GPA of 2.6, penalizing departments whose medians rise above that, better explaining grading protocols to students, and altering instructor evaluations to remove the negative impacts of grading difficulty.

None of those moved forward, and little has changed in the national grade inflation debate since then. Except the median GPA: A UNC-CH spokesperson said it rose from 3.31 in 2010 to 3.58 in 2025.

In response to McMahon’s call to action, the UNC System said only that it was “deliberating how to best address grade inflation through transparent, discipline-sensitive review of grade patterns alongside evidence of learning, licensure performance where applicable, program assessment, and subsequent student success.”

The lack of specificity is a sign of just how complex the problem is. 

“If you gave me a magic wand and said, ‘You get to run the University of Texas’s grading policy,’ I don’t know what I’d do,” Denning said.

“It’s not trivial,” he added. “It’s not like we have a ready solution sitting on the shelf.”