Does Grade Inflation Exist

Grade Inflation: Does it Still Exist?
The first question one may have is what is grade inflation? Grade inflation has proven to be a current epidemic that has grown tremendously over the past few years. Grade inflation may define as the increase over time of academic grades, and progressively faster than any real increase following to standards. Grade inflation is the phenomenon that has been occurring in universities since the 1960’s, this is the continued rise in the number of higher grades assigned to students. Another name for grade inflation is known as “content deflation”, this is where students receive the same grades as students in the past; however less work is required to put in, and in the end it requires less learning. Grade inflation
An obvious problem could be teachers. It’s difficult for the teachers to not get rid of grade inflation, especially seeing as; there can be many different desires. Especially considering when one has students applying great pressure to earn the “A” grade. Some logical reasoning behind the start of grade inflation is the Vietnam War. It was said that bad grades meant war for the kids so professors inflated grades to keep kids from taking part of the war. This may have been the reason for the start of grade inflation, but of course this is not the reason since it still happens today (Johnson, 2003). Today teachers are not inflating grades to keep kids out of Iraq, rather it is said that it is due to certain desires such as obtaining tenure at the university the teacher works at. To obtain tenure, a professor needs to qualify by meeting various requirements; one of these requirements is that a teacher must receive good reviews. One of the easiest ways to attain good reviews is by grading easily and be a rather easy going teacher, because chances are if the teacher makes his/her class extraordinarily difficult and the students struggle to get a “C” the student will more than likely give a poor
One public school may be extremely hard to earn a high G.P.A while another public school may be extremely easy. It is important to recognize that each varies in difficulty; public schools and private schools are not the only differentiating factor for inflation. (O'Shaughnessy, 2011)
It is also mentioned that there are different degrees of grade inflation from any major to major. For example a liberal arts major has a greater chance of earning an “A” compared to a, theoretically, engineer major or pretty much any major dealing with sciences and math.
There have been attempts to fix this problem, however none have actually worked. Stanford University actually attempted to deflate their grades, but their attempt failed. Teachers ended up not giving out “A” grades just to meet quota on deflation. To make things difficult all the rest of the universities never followed suite by deflated their grades as well. This in turn scared many of the students because their grade point average was lower than students from other schools, which made them fear for jobs in the future. What one may say to help this problem globally, not just individually, a higher grading