The trend of grade inflation over the last 50 years is well-documented, statistically speaking. Rojstaczer and Healy [6] found that an ‘A’ grade represents 43% of letter grades assigned at a “wide range of (135) schools”, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1988; they note also that schools with a science and engineering orientation grade more strictly than do those with a focus on liberal arts, and also that private universities have experienced a greater degree of grade inflation than have public universities. The most telling conclusion: “there is no indication that the rise in grades at public and private schools has been accompanied by an increase in student achievement. If anything, measures indicate that student performance has declined.” Rojstaczer and Healy cite a number of statistics to back this claim, including declining SAT scores, reduced literacy of college graduates, and decreased hours devoted to study. The early findings of Singleton and Smith [7] project the work conducted by Rojstaczer and Healy, noting that a student in 1966 with a 3.7 GPA was “almost certainly a better student” than a student at the same college with the same GPA in 1976.
Babcock and Marks [2] provide this last bit of essential evidence used by [6], namely the dwindling number of hours spent by college students on coursework in a week. Students in 1961 spent 40 hours/week on class and homework, whereas students in 2007 spent 27 hours/week. The major conclusion of the study has to do with corroboration of this trend; the statistical findings “are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools.” This paradoxical phenomenon is quite well-recognized and studied by a number of scholars of higher education.
Problematically, it is unclear whether it serves to suppress grade inflation or to instate supplementary grading policies, as is argued by Abbott in [1]. Externalities caused by action of the former kind are easily enumerated and critiqued — one such concern (the ruin caused by a poor GPA in the job market / grad school application process) is elaborated on in [3] — while the latter remains unexplored save for a few select universities. A plan of action in the United States is hard to cohesively and inclusively develop, too, since departments often have different enrollment requirements and grading expectations. Vocational departments often expect one to understand material that will serve as essential knowledge for a successful career, so a grade is a pure measure of comprehension, whereas disciplines within the arts and sciences are lent more easily to a grade as a measure of intuition or brilliance. One sweeping “deflation” policy will certainly fail to meet the unique needs of each type of department. [4] finds that student motivations will heavily inform such a policy if it is made, since many are concerned with grades as a measure of performance rather than mastery of material.