A longitudinal study of grades in 144 undergraduate courses

This paper describes the trends in course-by-course grading at a large public urban university over a recent six-year period. To determine if systematic grade inflation was occurring, the study analyzed 144 individual undergraduate courses. Multiple linear regressions were fitted to more than 125,000 final course grades by courses. Most course grading patterns showed little evidence of systematic and homogeneous change over time. Hence, the increasing cumulative GPA for undergraduates at the institution studied was not caused by a general relaxing of grading standards. Rather, the supposition is that more students are moving away from traditional curricula into courses and degree programs which they find have grading standards reflecting their abilities and/or interests.Presented at the Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, Houston, Texas, May 1978.