GPA Rising? Building a Model of Grade Inflation

In this study, we examined factors surrounding grade inflation, a concern that continues to persist in institutions of higher education. We argue that while GPAs may be rising, it is due to a multitude of internal and external influences, including environmental pressures, student, faculty, program, and curriculum variables, as well as several others, and not necessarily to the awarding of improper grades. We proposed a model consisting of 13 factors that theoretically have a positive or negative influence on grade point averages (GPAs), as well as an additional four that require further investigation. We then used historical GPA data from a small university in the Western United States to test and refine the model. The data consists of over eight million data points and covers the period from the Fall of 2006 through the Spring of 2020. We found no evidence of rising GPAs in the aggregate data and observed both falling and rising GPAs in the two colleges of the case university. We found a significant negative effect on GPAs for four of our propositions: open enrollment, adjunct faculty, hard discipline, and online; and three significant positive effects on GPA for three others: traditional undergraduate 100- to 200-level courses, persistence, and graduate students. We also demonstrate that numerous factors have contributed to the rise in GPAs over the past few decades. The question remains as to whether the grades that students receive are indeed reflective of the quality of work submitted; however, the ultimate proof is graduates’ success in the marketplace. We hope that other institutions of higher education will use and adapt our model to investigate potential grade inflation in their own organizations.