A for Effort | December 2026 Premium Webinar

Grade Inflation and the Sliding Scale of Academic Achievement

Are today's college courses too easy? Despite K-12 standardized test scores plummeting, more and more college faculty are handing out  A’s.

Around 60 percent of faculty said in a recent Chronicle survey that they lowered their expectations in response to students being less prepared. Others said they faced administrative pressure to pass failing students onto the graduation stage and that they fear students giving them a negative review. Different institutions are going in different directions with their grading landscape—Harvard’s faculty recently set a cap on the number of A’s they distribute, while the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts dumped grades altogether for their freshmen before backtracking.

Join Senior Editor Daarel Burnette II for a discussion, grounded in The Chronicle's reporting, of why grades are rising, the value behind student evaluation, and the path forward for grading the students of today.

In this 75-minute session, you will gain insight on: 

• Theories behind why grades are rising so rapidly.
• The alternative grading strategies some colleges are trialing.
• How AI is impacting the ways professors evaluate students.
• How administrators are reviewing their grade distributions.
• What rights professors have over student evaluation. 
  

In addition to joining the session, registrants will receive Chronicle materials related to the topic and get access to a special followup Q&A.   

Please note that the program will be recorded and distributed to registrants upon its conclusion. If you won’t be able to join us live, you can still save your spot to access the recordings and resources at a later time. For planning purposes, there are no refunds—including for missed sessions.

Event access instructions will be sent separately. You will receive webinar access from "no-reply@zoom.us" and additional course information from "workshops@cs.chronicle.com". Please add workshops@chronicle.com and workshops@cs.chronicle.com to your approved senders to ensure that communications arrive directly to your inbox.

Speakers

Shea Vance, Reporting Fellow, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Daarel Burnette II, Senior Editor, The Chronicle of Higher Education