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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.
We all suffer the consequences of the information loss as the default grade becomes an A. Student learning is related to engagement and academic challenge, and some indicators of this, such as reported study time, have declined even as grades have increased. Given only positive feedback, graduates may naturally overestimate their abilities and find that their skills aren’t competitive. Employers and graduate schools have to work harder to rank candidates, and a logical reaction to grade inflation is to prefer graduates who are from highly selective colleges—depending on the prescreening of the admissions process to do the sorting. This diminishes opportunities for excellent students at nonelite institutions, who get lost in the slush pile of high-GPA candidates.
New Federal Attention
Despite higher ed’s regulatory triad of states, the federal Department of Education and accreditors, there is no general oversight of transcript quality. This seems to be changing. At the December 2025 meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent called for “honest grading and academic rigor.” This is a long echo of the 1983 recommendation in A Nation at Risk: “Grades should be indicators of academic achievement so they can be relied on as evidence of a student’s readiness for further study.”
Federal oversight is not well suited to regulate transcript quality, but it could usefully nudge accreditors in that direction. One place to begin is with new regulations for accreditors, which specify conditions for being recognized by the Department of Education. In announcing plans to revise these regulations in January, the administration cited “student achievement and outcomes” and “high educational quality” as goals.
The current rules specify conditions for an accreditor to be recognized as “a reliable authority regarding the quality of the education or training provided by the institutions or programs it accredits.” These require institutional measures of student achievement such as “state licensing examinations, course completion, and job placement rates.” Course completion is tightly linked to grades, and GPAs are leading indicators of career outcomes. A revised rule could specify that “agencies demonstrate how they evaluate whether transcripts function as meaningful indicators of student learning and progression.”
To support these efforts, the Department of Education should explore creating a national repository for grade data, perhaps in collaboration with the National Student Clearinghouse, so that regular national studies can be conducted
What Accreditors Can Do
This is not a call for federal grading standards or GPA normalization, but for accreditors to treat transcript quality as an auditable educational outcome—much like curriculum coherence or faculty qualifications. Existing standards for student learning (“assessment”) can be adopted for this purpose.
Assessment standards call for goals and measures of learning, but in practice this has been interpreted to exclude course grades; there is no focus on transcript quality as an overarching outcome. Accreditors have an opportunity to show leadership and new relevance by refocusing learning standards on course grades and transcripts. This would require revisiting the informal assumptions about what counts as evidence—for example, the expectation that assessment must rely primarily on rubric-based artifacts rather than course-level data. Primary evidence should consist of the university’s comprehensive records of course grades and student characteristics.
With time, accreditor oversight could create new transparency about grades within and between institutions. Accrediting agencies could facilitate the exchange of ideas and methods at annual meetings. Some institutions already publish grade distributions, and providing individual comparisons to faculty has been shown to improve grading consistency. Comparisons among accredited institutions would undoubtedly lead to a better understanding of grading practices than is possible now.
The biggest win may be in finally gaining an understanding of student learning, so that we can improve it. A Nation at Risk’s goal was “to develop the talents of all to their fullest. Attaining that goal requires that we expect and assist all students to work to the limits of their capabilities.” Academic challenge and student ability are not the focus of the current assessment practice, which atomizes the curriculum into unrelated assessment projects that are statistically underpowered. But course difficulty and student ability can both be estimated from grades, allowing for rich exploration of the causes of learning, especially in combination with large-scale assessment data. This research allows us to understand what grades mean and thereby assess transcript quality.
For example, grade data can be used to improve advising by estimating the effect of delaying a first course in mathematics, foreign language or other sequential subjects where skills decay over time. Do students who wait a year perform worse? Do grades in Calculus I predict performance in Calculus II as they should? These are empirical questions that can be answered directly from university records.
There are sure to be new problems and ethical dilemmas with grades, and new ways to game the system. Grades will always be imperfect measures. But accreditors are uniquely suited to use a light touch to encourage transparency and innovation so that the best solutions can bubble to the top. University leaders and others who comprise the boards of accrediting bodies should consider the cost of ignoring this problem. It might include state or federal mandates that don’t fit your institution’s mission or circumstances. The problem is difficult, but it presents an opportunity for leadership.
