Accreditors Can Fix Grades
David Eubanks
March 3, 2026
Accreditors are uniquely positioned to address grade inflation and issues of transcript quality.
The meaningfulness of college transcripts has been eroding for decades. While national data on grades is scarce, there is plenty of evidence that A’s are becoming the default grade across much of higher ed (with some dissenting views). High-profile articles about Harvard University have drawn new attention to the topic of grade inflation.
Incentives align to push grades ever higher. Students prefer higher marks, and it’s easier on professors to assign them, in part for the sake of course evaluations, in part to avoid being bothered. Departments that compete for enrollment don’t want to look unduly difficult, and institutions don’t want to penalize their graduates in the job market with lower marks. Grade inflation is self-reinforcing: As Yascha Mounk has observed, when most grades are an A, there’s no way to recover from a C-plus, so it’s better for your GPA to avoid harder courses.
