Grade Inflation or Grade Increase

Grade Inflation and Education Quality

We consider a game in which schools compete to place graduates in two distinct ways: by investing in the quality of education, and by strategically designing grading policies. In equilibrium, schools issue grades that do not perfectly reveal graduate abilities. This leads evaluators to have less-accurate information when hiring or admitting graduates. However, compared to fully-revealing gradin...

To grade or not to grade.

University Competition, Grading Standards and Grade Inflation

We develop a model of strategic grade determination by universities distinguished by their distributions of student academic abilities. Universities choose grading standards to maximize total wages of graduates. Job placement and wages hinge on a firm’s productivity assessment given a student’s university, grade and productivity signal. We identify conditions under which better universities set...

Equilibrium Information Disclosure: Grade Inflation and Unraveling∗

This paper explores information disclosure in matching markets, e.g. the informativeness of transcripts given out by universities. We show that the same amount of information is disclosed in all equilibria. We then demonstrate that if universities disclose the equilibrium amount of information, students and employers will not find it profitable to contract early; if they disclose more, unraveli...

Honest Grading, Grade Inflation and Reputation

When grades lose their informative value because the percentage of students receiving the best grade rises without any corresponding increase in ability, this is called grade inflation. Conventional wisdom says that such grade inflation is unavoidable since it is essentially costless to award good grades. In this paper, we point out an effect driving into the opposite direction: Grade inflation...