With college becoming more expensive, schools may feel the need to reward the investment with an A grade, even when it’s undeserved. Stuart Rojstaczer and Chris Healy have studied college grade averages and a recent analysis revealed some noteworthy trends. In 2013, the most common grade was an A, handed out to 45 percent of students.
In what is called the “student as consumer era,” or the “consumer era,” students are given high grades because they and their parents expect them along with high tuition costs. Professors face the pressure of “a new and more personal exigency with respect to grading: to keep their leadership happy (and to help ensure their tenure and promotion) they had to focus on keeping students happy.”
The era from the 1980s, “which has yet to end,” is not the first period of grade inflation. In what is called the “Vietnam era,” professors gave out higher than deserved grades to young men so they would not fail out and be drafted into war.
But, as is noted, “the consumer era is different.” Millennial college students have also been referred to as the “snowflake nation,” unwilling to accept the normal B’s and C’s:
It would seem then that grades hardly matter anymore. As the grade inflation analysis pointed out, this is “The Era of A Becoming Ordinary.”
