Stu Burguiere looks at the remarkable increase in higher grades handed out at US universities:
I never went to college so I missed out on all the keg parties and, apparently, a surplus of good grades.
Contrary to the concept of school as you knew it growing up, A’s are pretty easy to come by these days. In fact the only thing you have to work really hard to get are D’s and F’s. In college today, an A is over four times as common as a D or an F combined.
It’s a drastic change from the 15% of students who received A’s in 1960.
The pool is a little higher today. Ok, it’s a lot higher. If you look at this chart you’ll see that 43% of all letter grades given today are A’s.
And this sort of makes sense if you think about it. No one wants to pay $40,000 a year to hear that they’re dumb.
College is one of the rare businesses in which you pay them and at the end of the experience they tell you how well they did. If you’re a parent and you send your kids to school and they get A’s you feel good about the purchase. But if your kids get F’s you feel like they wasted your money.
And amazingly these institutions of higher learning, that do little other than indoctrinate kids against the evils of capitalism, sure do understand incentives.
