Jeonghyun Kim and Cory Koedel:
Grades at American universities have been rising for decades, a trend that accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But what happened after that? Using new data collected through the 2023-24 school year, we can see how grades continue to evolve. The Covid spike in grades corrected in the two years immediately after the pandemic, but the drop in grades was short-lived — the decades-long upward trajectory resumed thereafter.
We looked at average grades in all freshman-level undergraduate courses from 2011-12 to 2023-24 at eight large public universities: Kent State University, Missouri State University, Northern Arizona University, Texas A&M University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Missouri at Columbia, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (These institutions post their grade distributions online.) While all of these are large universities, they range from not selective to highly selective, meaning grading in this sample likely reflects university grading more broadly.
Below we graph overall grade trends as well as separate trends in the following fields: business and economics, social sciences and humanities, and math-intensive STEM, which excludes biology.
The overall trend shows steady increases through the 2010s, culminating in a sharp spike in 2020. The average freshman-level course grade rose from just above 3.0 in 2012 (a B) to 3.3 by 2020 (a B+). After corrections in 2021 and 2022, the trend turned upward again in 2023, resuming its pre-pandemic trajectory.
The same pattern — a pandemic spike, followed by a post-pandemic correction and then the resumption of grade inflation — is apparent across fields, with the exception of business and economics, which reverted to its 2016-19 flatter trend. (Still, grades rose rapidly in business and economics in the early 2010s.)
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