Grading inflation is a major problem in academia. The paper's purpose is to assess graduate students' perception of grade inflation. Students' results (n = 120) are examined by gender and grade point average. According to students, grade inflation is not a problem and grades accurately reflect performance. Respondents believe that some students…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine whether students perceive grade inflation as a problem. It questions whether differences exist in perceptions based upon gender and grade point average (GPA). Design/methodology/approach: Previously validated scales were used to assess perceptions. The sample included 108 full-time…

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…

At least one third of all U.S. college students don't get a degree, even six years after they enroll. Earlier research focusing on trends through 1990 found broad declines in college graduation rates, especially among men attending less-selective four-year schools. Since then, however, the picture of college enrollment has changed dramatically,…

Purpose: This paper focuses on the factors related to faculty workload in the context of resource scarcity to examine whether there is a relationship between them and grade inflation. Design/methodology/approach: As for methodological novelty, the authors created an indicator of students' expectations about grades that is related to grade…

We use student-level administrative data from Delaware for 43,767 high school students across five 12th grade cohorts from 2017 to 2021. We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate both student transcript strength ([theta]) and course difficulty. We…

First-year mathematics instructors at universities across North America and the globe have been noticing a decline in the mathematics skills and preparation of their incoming students, who have been failing out of first-year mathematics courses at alarming rates. Though some universities have implemented placement or diagnostic tests to measure…

The COVID-19 pandemic required adaptation to a new learning environment creating challenges for students and instructors. A reduction in student-teacher contact and the lack of supervision should have led to a decline in students' academic performance. Nonetheless, studies report increases in grades during the pandemic. Yet, limited information is…

The authors examine the impact of a new online learning system on student performance in a core finance course required of all business majors. They find that the online learning system significantly reduces the number of students that withdraw from the course prior to course completion. Additionally, the benefits of a lower withdrawal rate…

College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed--since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional resources, and institution attended do not explain much of…

Grading reliability for a class can be measured as the correlation between the students' grade point average (GPA) and the grades they received in that class. Grading leniency can be measured as the difference between the average grade for the class and the students' average GPA. Data from more than fifty-thousand course sections show that lenient…

Grade inflation, involving comparisons between public and independent schools, is presently under discussion in Sweden. This paper reports on discrepancies between national test results and the final course grade in social sciences, in year 9. Open data at school level were used in OLS regression analyses to scrutinise systematic differences…

A student's ranking in the grade point average (GPA) distribution has emerged as an admission variable that increases admission rates of both segregated minorities and high-performance individuals. In 2012, Chile's centralized university admission system introduced a GPA ranking variable relative to the previous cohorts' average GPA. Such a system…

This study employs hierarchal linear modeling to examine whether high school grade inflation occurred between 2010 and 2021, including for students who were tested during the pandemic. The study does so while simultaneously accounting for student and school characteristics. This is the first study, to the current authors' knowledge, that makes use…

Research is available on the graduation rates among primarily on-line institutions and traditional universities, but not much on the effect of on-line classes within a university setting. According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in spring 2011, 89% of four-year public colleges and universities offered online classes, and 46% of recent…