Grades are the fundamental currency of our educational system; they incentivize student performance and academic behavior, and signal quality of student academic achievement to parents, employers, postsecondary gatekeepers, and students themselves. Grade inflation compromises the value of grades and undermines their capacity to achieve the functions for which they are intended. I challenge the ‘increases in grade point average’ definition of grade inflation employed by critics and argue that grade inflation must be understood in terms of the signaling power of grades. Analyzing data from four nationally representative samples of high school students, I find that in the decades following 1972: (a) grades have risen at high schools and dropped at four-year colleges, in general, and selective four-year institutions, in particular; and (b) the signaling power of grades has attenuated little, if at all. I conclude that the concerns of critics who warn of rampant grade inflation are misplaced. Grades at secondary and postsecondary institutions are just as meaningful now as they were four decades ago. / text

Yes / Work based assessment (WBA) is a common but contentious practice increasingly used to grade university students on professional degrees. A key issue in WBA is the potentially low assessment literacy of the assessors, which can lead to a host of unintended results, including grade inflation. We identified grade inflation in the WBA of the clinical module analysed for this study, and to address it we trialled two adjustments over a four-year period. The first and simpler adjustment, reducing the academic weighting of the WBA component of the module, appeared to lower grade inflation but actually had the inverse effect over time. The second adjustment, introducing a structured formative assessment, reduced the average WBA grade both initially and over time. In addition to this desired result, the second adjustment has brought ongoing benefits to the learning and teaching on the module as a whole.

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Grades awarded to undergraduate students at Brigham Young University over a 20-year period were analyzed to determine to what extent the mean GPA may have increased. Study variables included enrolled freshman mean ACT, enrolled freshman mean AP credits, faculty research productivity, student evaluations of teaching (SET), and a university policy change regarding course withdrawal dates and calculating students' mean GPA. Other study variables included the overall grading philosophy of the college or school (normative, mastery, or other) and the course level (upper division, lower division). The study employed a regression model with splines for the residual, or yearly trend. Upper division courses have higher mean GPA than lower division courses, and mean GPA in mastery-based grading colleges are higher than in normative-based grading colleges. Mean GPA in upper division courses are consistently higher than mean GPA of lower courses, regardless of college grouping, but the difference between the upper and lower division mean GPA scores of the normative-grading classification is significantly larger than the difference between upper and lower division mean GPA of the other two grading classifications. Faculty research productivity had no impact on mean GPA. SET scores are highly correlated with college grading philosophy and course level and did not further predict mean GPA. The university policy change had no statistically significant effect on most mean GPA, but there is a marginally significant negative local effect on mean GPA of the lower division normative courses, as well as a marginally significant positive effect on mean GPA of lower division mastery courses. Grade trends vary between colleges with differing grading philosophies. They also likely vary across departments within colleges and from course to course within departments. Trends also differ between course level. Except for the non-significant effect of the policy change, mean GPA trends across most categories at the university have leveled off for more than a decade and are likely to remain so. Study results indicate there is no reason for alarm and that no systemic, rampant pattern of grade inflation is evident.

In recent years, Sweden has adopted a criterion-referenced grading system, where the grade outcome is used for several purposes, but foremost for educational evaluation on student- and school levels as well as for selection to higher education. This thesis investigates the consequences of using criterion-referenced measurement for both educational evaluation and selection purposes. The thesis comprises an introduction and four papers that empirically investigate school grades and grading practices in Swedish upper secondary schools. The first paper investigates the effect of school competition on the school grades. The analysis focuses on how students in schools with and without competition are ranked, based on their grades and SweSAT scores. The results show that schools that are exposed to competition tend to grade their students higher than other schools. This effect is found to be related to the use of grades as quality indicators for the schools, which means that schools that compete for their students tend to be more lenient, hence inflating the grades. The second paper investigates grade averages over a six-year period, starting with the first cohort who graduated from upper secondary school with a GPA based on criterion-referenced grades. The results show that grades have increased every year since the new grading system was introduced, which cannot be explained by improved performances, selection effects or strategic course choices. The conclusion is that the increasing pressure for high grading has led to grade inflation over time. The third paper investigates if grading practices are related to school size. The study is based on a similar model as paper I, but with data from graduates over a six-year period, and with school size as the main focus. The results show small but significant size effects, suggesting that the smallest schools (<300 students) are higher grading than other schools, and that the largest schools (>1000 students) are lower grading than other schools. This is assumed to be an effect of varying assessment practices, in combination with external and internal pressure for high grading. The fourth and final paper investigates if grading practices differ among upper secondary programmes, and how the course compositions in the programmes affect how students are ranked in the process of selection to higher education. The results show that students in vocationally oriented programmes are higher graded than other students, and also favoured by their programmes’ course compositions, which have a positive effect on their competitive strength in the selection to higher education. In the introductory part of the thesis, these results are discussed from the perspective of a theoretical framework, with special attention to validity issues in a broad perspective. The conclusion is that the criterion-referenced grades, both in terms of being used for educational evaluation, and as an instrument for selection to higher education, are wanting both in reliability and in validity. This is related to the conflicting purposes of the instruments, in combination with few control mechanisms, which affects how grades are interpreted and used, hence leading to consequences for students, schools and society in general.

abstract: Abstract: This study investigates grades from 1980 to 2010 in English 102 at Arizona State University Tempe Campus to see if grade inflation has taken place. It concludes it has and then goes on to study the causes. The data was collected from existing data held in the archives of the Registrar's Office, collated into proper order and saved in proper numerical format for analysis. After analysis, the data was reviewed to establish whether or not as consumer demands rise, measured by student responses to evaluation questions, grade point averages rise as well, and whether demands for adequate performance in classrooms have declined. This study statistically analyzes students' final grades in ENG102 for thirty years and concludes that grade compression at the top of the grading scale exists. This study discusses the implications of that compression at length. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2015

In Sweden, there has been an increased discrepancy between increasing merit ratings and decreasing results in international surveys such as PISA. At the same time, since the 1990s, Sweden has had several reforms that resulted in increased competition, decentralization and trust-based evaluations. Several studies have shown that grade leniency depends on school provider as well as level of competition between schools. This study focuses on how grade inflation in municipality schools for 9th graders is affected when an independent school is established nearby, using a fixed-effects model at the municipality level but with control variables at the individual level. I study all Swedish 9th graders between 2003-2017. An alternative specification with school fixed effects is also presented. I find that grades are set more leniently in competitive municipalities and that grade deviance is highly correlated with socio-economic factors. It is also concluded that the effect size is small in comparison to the average provider difference and individual level characteristics. The study extends the literature by focusing on grade inflation amongst municipality schools, and by focusing on the change in grade inflation rather than the average effect over time in terms of provider differences.

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This study examines grading patterns during one intuition’s transition to a responsibility center management (RCM) budget model. RCM is intended to focus an institution on resource growth and cost control, and the model incentivizes and rewards these behaviors. The adoption of RCM is becoming more widespread across the United States, especially as institutions are experiencing declining enrollment and shrinking state support (Barr & McClellan, 2018; State Higher Education Executive Officers Association [SHEEO], 2021; The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2019). This has led to budget management being cited as a top priority for institutional leaders (Bass et al., 2021; Rylee, 2011). This decline in enrollment and shrinking state support makes institutions more reliant on existing and prospective students as their primary source of revenue. Through the lens of Resource Dependency Theory (RDT) it is reasonable to assume that institutions may engage in behaviors and practices to maximize their relationship with students. Moreover, as students continue to see themselves as consumers who deserve high grades and a degree, institutions have changed their grading practices to attract and retain these students, and research has shown that students take advantage of these practices to protect their GPA (Bromley et al., 1978; Goldman, 1985). Additionally, research has shown that students, in part, make course choices based on difficulty and expected grade (e.g., Barr et al., 2009; Butcher et al., 2014; Fournier & Sass, 2000; Sabot & Wakemin-Linn, 1991). Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that institutions may transition to RCM to focus on resource growth, and given their reliance on student enrollment, may engage in practices and behaviors to maximize the relationship between the institution and the student. These actions may have unintended consequences, such as grade inflation. My study begins to examine if grade inflation is an unintended consequence of a transition to RCM by exploring what happened to grades during one institution’s transition to RCM. The results of my study show that at Public Research University (PRU), a pseudonym, grades continued to increase during and after the implementation of RCM, with a statistically significant increase occurring in the year immediately following PRU’s “hold harmless” year. My results also show that grades continued to rise during and after PRU’s transition to RCM across all departments when categorized based on historical GPAs, selectivity levels, and enrollment levels. This study is intended to raise awareness of the far-reaching effects that central university decisions, such as budget model choice, may have across the entire institution – both intended and unintended. / Educational Leadership

Denna uppsats avser att besvara frågeställningen om det förekommer någon skillnad i betygsinflation mellan fristående och kommunala grundskolor. Frågan besvaras genom att jämföra resultat på PISA-tester med nationella prov och slutbetyg. Datan är hämtad från OECD:s och Skolverkets databaser och den metod som används för att jämföra informationen från de två databaserna är coarsened exact matching. Resultaten visar att det förekommer ett statistiskt signifikant samband mellan typ av huvudman och avvikelser i betygspoäng i ämnet svenska, där fristående skolor avviker mer än kommunala skolor. Inget signifikant samband råder för matematik. Det går inte att utesluta att avvikelserna beror på andra faktorer än betygsinflation såsom skillnader i vad de olika resultatmåtten avser att fånga. / This thesis aims to answer the question of whether there is a difference in grade inflation between independent and municipal compulsory schools. This is done by comparing results of PISA-tests to the national tests and the final grades. The data is collected from the OECD’s and the Swedish National Agency for Education’s databases and the method used for comparing the information from the two databases is coarsened exact matching. The results show that there is a significant relationship between type of school organiser and deviations in grade points for the subject Swedish where independent deviate more than municipal schools. There is no significant relationship for mathematics. It cannot be ruled out that the deviations arise due to other factors than grade inflation, such as differences in what the performance measures are constructed to reflect.