The Economic Roots of Grade Inflation
Student evaluations subject professors to perverse incentives.
By Joseph Epstein
Wall Street Journal
December 11, 2025
The one form of inflation that can’t be blamed on Joe Biden is grade inflation. Evidence of this practice is the preponderance of A’s in student grades at Harvard and other formerly elite universities and colleges. Nearly everyone these days turns out to be an A student.
While many factors have contributed to grade inflation, I believe it began in earnest as student evaluations became widespread in the 1960s—an offshoot of the student protest movement of that day. At a term’s close, students graded their teachers. These evaluations could affect whether an academic department bestowed tenure on a young professor or promoted an associate professor. A large number of negative evaluations could do a teacher in, even cause him to be fired.
Student evaluations encouraged informality in the classroom. Many young professors ceased to come across as authority figures, but presented themselves as contemporaries of their students, all but equals. Professors no longer regularly wore jackets and ties or dresses to class, but came in jeans. They addressed students by their first names, and in some cases encouraged students to do the same to them. Love affairs between young professors and undergraduates, once the cause of scandal and immediate dismissal, became more common. It isn’t easy to give a C or D, let alone an F, to someone with whom you are sleeping.
Student evaluations tended to be unimpressive, if those I received during my years teaching English at Northwestern University are any example. “This guy knows his stuff,” read one. “I like his bow ties,” read another. “I wish some of the novels in this course weren’t so long,” went one, complaining less about me than about Henry James. I retired from teaching in 2002, and only one interesting evaluation sticks in my mind after all these years: “I did well in this course, but then I would have been ashamed not to have done.”
But the real effect of student evaluations was to make many professors change how they issued grades. A teacher known as “a tough grader” might fail to attract students and receive negative student evaluations in ways that could affect his professional future.
Soon, A’s were flying about the joint. An A became less a sign of intellectual superiority than a common grade, like the Gentleman’s C of an earlier day. The students attending Northwestern, as at many other schools, have what I call “the habits of achievement.” They did what their professors asked of them—read the book, wrote the paper—and usually on time. What the hell, why not give them A’s? Who gets hurt if in a classroom of 30 students you as the teacher give out 24 A’s? Nobody, really.
All that is forfeited is the notion of merit. A meritocracy sets a standard, posits an ideal, gives the more ambitious people in a society something to look up to and to shoot for. It can’t exist when nearly everyone is an A student.
Not that school grades are the only measure, or even an especially good measure, of intelligence. Many a genius has been not all that good at learning in a formal school setting: Blaise Pascal, Leo Tolstoy and Albert Einstein are notable examples. Perhaps they were bored by school; perhaps they saw too far beyond what the classroom had to offer.
Still, lowering classroom standards by inflating grades can’t help. Making everyone equal only levels out society, in some cases sending the wrong people to medical and other professional schools and allowing too many people to have an exaggerated idea of themselves. Like other forms of inflation, grade inflation ultimately means exaggeration—and neither in the marketplace, nor in the classroom, is exaggeration a good thing.
Mr. Epstein is author, most recently, of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life.”
