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,…

Outcomes assessment in an academic family science program led to the accidental discovery of grade inflation that was causing impaction problems in upper-division major courses. The current analysis evaluates the effectiveness of a policy intervention designed to improve academic rigor in previously grade-inflated classes. The new policy required…

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…

Asking students to evaluate teaching faculty by every ending semester in modern education is an established trend. In the higher education circles, it is validated based on a large body of research showing a relationship between these evaluations and students' achievement. The arising problem is whether this relation is positively associated or…

The move from elite to mass systems of higher education has been accompanied by concerns relating to the quality of provision and standards, particularly in relation to the increasing proportion of higher grades awarded to students. Bayesian multilevel models were used to investigate the temporal trend of grade attainment in 101 higher education…

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…

Scholars have argued that grade inflation is pervasive throughout colleges and universities and that it is presently at an all-time high. Inflation is, however, a temporal concept: it is theoretically impossible for grades to keep increasing on a fixed scale. In this article we examine a related, though empirically distinct, phenomenon: the…

This study investigates grade inflation in 127 language, linguistics, translation, education, and computer courses taught at some Saudi universities before, during and after the Pandemic. Grades obtained from some instructors for courses taught over 8 semesters were analyzed. It was found that between 20% 65% chose a pass/no-grade results, the…

We examine the relationship between secondary school attainment and early-career graduate salaries in the UK. Based on literature on grade inflation, we hypothesise that there is uncertainty regarding the quality of the signal communicated by degree classifications, and that secondary school grades can be used as a tool to determine the veracity…

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…

This article analyses a number of trends in final exam results at selected German universities. Our research covers 12 prominent fields of study from 1960 to 2010. Data prior to 1997 were collected from eight university archives. The first part of the article descriptively presents long-term stable differences between fields of study as well as…

With a strong movement of schools starting to use standards-based grading practices, one of the aims of this study was to learn if traditional grading practices communicate grades that are accurate based on the students' learning of the course objectives. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which employability and homework…

What do students learn in school? In the 21 century, this question has become a political dilemma for countries around the globe. It is a deceptively simple question, but there has never been an easy answer. The problem of measuring student learning appears to express an educational problem: What and how much do students learn? Most student…