This investigation documents an intervention that successfully counteracted a grade inflation trend at a small, Catholic, liberal arts university in the eastern United States. The intervention produced a significant drop in grades awarded by full-time faculty, but not by adjunct faculty who were not yet included in the intervention. Institutional…

Throughout classrooms in the United States there appears to have been a general watering down of academic standards. The percentages of "A" and "B" grades have risen, and at some schools, the percentage of grades of "C" or lower has plummeted. Numerous scholarly articles about grade inflation discuss the extent,…

Among the academic community, there is a perception that there is an upward shift in grade point average over an extended period of time without a corresponding increase in achievement. This trend has become an alarming topic among educators, industry and the general public. Some attribute increases in GPA to improvements in student quality while…

Researchers have labeled today's college students as perceiving themselves to be more entitled than ever before (J. M. Twenge, 2006). The results of the present study suggest that this may be true for college men, in particular, because they report significantly more academic entitlement than women do. In Study 1, the present authors used survey…

The topic of grade inflation, the awarding of too many "A's" and "B's", is frequently mentioned in the literature on higher education. Many educational philosophies have suggested ways to evaluate students fairly. Some professors have used the bell-shaped curve as a model, giving grades according to the normal distribution curve regardless of the…

This publication provides information relating to Arizona Academic Standards for Grade 8. The following standards are reviewed: (1) the arts standards; (2) comprehensive health standards; (3) foreign and native language standards; (4) reading standard articulated by grade level 2003; (5) writing standard articulated by grade level 2004; (6)…

A defense is presented for allowing all students a reasonable chance to make an "A," based on the belief that competition often works to the detriment of many students. (DS)

This case was written for use in courses dealing with school administration, philosophy of education, or ethics in educational leadership. It deals with the ethical dilemma of an assistant principal at a low-performing, urban high school. Caught between a principal and a teacher who have different views on plagiarism, the assistant principal must…

Purpose: Student evaluation of teaching (SET) questionnaires are used in many countries, although much current research questions the validity of these surveys. US research indicates that more than 90 percent of academic accounting departments use this performance measurement. This paper aims to focus on the validity of SET data.…

This letter to Harvard University's new president compares what he pledged in his inaugural address to what has actually occurred, noting that the true tests of his leadership will be his handling of ROTC, grade inflation, and affirmative action and suggesting that the greatest threat to the university is balkanization into warring factions…

Grade inflation has become a general term for teachers and administrators in recent times and is an ambiguous denomination which needs to be identified. The allegory and reality of grade inflation is discussed.

This paper explores the connection between grade inflation and school competition by studying graduates from the Swedish upper secondary schools in 1997. The final grades are compared to the SweSAT national test scores. Single school municipalities are compared with multiple school municipalities in order to study if potential intra-municipal…

Assigning grades to student work, both during the academic term and as a summation of a student's mastery of subject matter, is a longstanding practice in all levels of education, from kindergarten through graduate and professional studies. Recently, a variety of factors have brought the criteria for assigning, and the resulting distribution of…

This paper considers whether high schools in competitive environments use grade inflation to attract and retain families, perhaps in addition to more constructive responses. Two measures of grade inflation are used: the cutoffs used by each school to assign a letter grade to a percent score and high school grade point average after controlling for…

Grade inflation has commanded increasing attention in the academic world in recent years, with administrators, faculty, and academic analysts unable to agree on whether grade inflation actually exists or is a myth to be debunked. This Digest reviews research in support of and against the existence of grade inflation. A statistical analysis report…