Grade inflation seems like a classic commons tragedy: any individual student may benefit marginally from it in the short term, but it slowly degrades the collective welfare. There was a great article recently in the NYT explaining the phenomenon and some of the proposed solutions, the most common of which is to publish mean grades for each course on a student's transcript along with mean GPAs for a student's major, college, and university. Clearly, the point of this solution is to give readers of a transcript a clear measure of how the student ranks relative to their peers. Notably, few realists propose that faculty and administrators grow a spine and just give normal fricken grades: C is average.

I found the NYT article interesting, but only thought to write about grade inflation when I digitized some of my old binders from UIUC and found the following grading scheme in my Chemical Engineering 373, Mass Transfer Operations course. Take a look at that. Now there is a professor with some spine. He gave that out on day one such that it was clear everybody: these are the metrics by which your grade is assigned, deal with it or drop the course. Kudos.

My wife teaches at Yale, which according to Stuart Rojstaczer has one of the worst cases of grade inflation. Yale's GPA increased nearly one whole grade over the past 45 years. As Rojstaczer's research shows, grade inflation is particularly pernicious at private schools where many conjecture the financial demands of universities, both endowment and tuition, cause a comfortable tis-for-tat relationship. My wife said if she used the grading scheme above, that all her students would drop out on day 1 and she'd have a call from the administration shortly thereafter. (Aside: my wife has never attended a public school, so I believe all her grades to be highly suspect.)

Many say that top-tier schools should award higher grades because the students are brighter than their lower-tiered brethren. The later part is almost certainly true. I went to MIT for grad school and was amazed at the undergrad population, which is fraught with ridiculously talented people. However, I don't believe this is grounds for high grades overall. I contend that the school's brand is enough to communicate "mean talent" to the outside world. That is, I believe employers are more likely to hire a "top tier" B student over a "lower tier" A student, and for good reason. Top tier universities should take a principled stand on grade inflation: they're only shooting themselves in the foot.