Middlebury’s Economics Department recently set a new department-wide threshold of 95% for receiving an A-grade. As we recently reported, this policy change stemmed from concerns about grade inflation, which has prompted us to ask: What is the value of an A?
As a selective college with a competitive admissions process, Middlebury is populated with students who are already smart and high-achieving. It’s not necessarily surprising that these students earn high grades, given the highly competitive college application process. But if everyone is getting an A, what does an A mean? Is it a measure of excellence or capitulation to students and their anxieties regarding their GPA?
In some ways, the Economics Department faces a distinct challenge: Economics and International Politics & Economics majors together account for over 20% of students with declared majors who are on campus this spring. Bigger class sizes and more majors trying to fill requirements can make it harder to maintain rigorous, individualized grading standards and create pressure to hand out high grades. With many of these students recruiting for finance and consulting jobs beginning in their sophomore year, economics classes can become transactional rather than valuable in their own right. The desire to have a competitive resume when applying to jobs often trumps students’ willingness to take academic risks, leaving economics classrooms often feeling devoid of genuine interest in the subject matter.
However, the problem of grade inflation is not unique to the economics department, and it is inextricably tied to the rise of AI models, which diminish the effectiveness of take-home assignments like essays and problem sets as grading tools. One of the cornerstones of a liberal arts education is the development of critical thinking skills through assignments that reward sustained engagement with the material and careful argumentation. Professors who are most concerned about AI are increasingly being forced to confront grade inflation at the same time, because the two problems are deeply intertwined. If professors can no longer rely on out-of-class written work to be an accurate representation of how much students have learned and thought about the material, these assignments are no longer effective grading tools.
There is also a collective action problem that makes it feel futile for any single institution to address grade inflation unilaterally. Middlebury is just one of many competitive colleges which are also giving their students a large number of A’s. Although Harvard has undertaken a public grade deflation campaign, schools with lower national profiles don’t want to be the first ones to deflate grades and disadvantage their students in the job market, especially because news about a grade deflation policy change at a small liberal arts school is unlikely to reach many recruiters. There is a clear incentive to continue giving students high grades so they remain employed in attractive fields after graduation and thus attract more prospective students.
We also have to think about what grades mean to students themselves. For many of us, college represents a stressful limbo: We are investing large amounts of money and time and often feel immense pressure to make this investment worthwhile by being successful. Grade-point average is a clear measure of success that signals to employers that you are smart and capable, and signals to yourself that you are “making the most” of your education. Given these pressures, students are incentivized to enroll in easier classes and treat each course as an opportunity to check a box rather than an opportunity for intellectual growth.
Grades were designed to communicate something meaningful about a student’s mastery of material — in most institutions in previous generations, a B-grade would indicate satisfactory performance, but to many students today, it would be received as a failure. Despite Middlebury students’ fear of bad grades, several of us on the Editorial Board noted that we learned the most from classes we were willing to struggle in. Part of this conversation requires students to reflect and ask ourselves questions, chief among them: What are we here for? College is one of the few places designed for curiosity, where you can take a class completely unrelated to your major or misunderstand a concept publicly and have the opportunity to learn from it. If we are all too scared to take risks for fear of poor grades, we are losing something valuable about the college experience that is difficult to replicate anywhere else.
We call for a more nuanced conversation about grading standards beyond letter grades or percentage cutoffs. We need to reckon with how work is assessed in the age of AI. As pre-professional culture encroaches on academic life here at Middlebury, we must also reflect on what it means to receive a liberal arts education. There are real institutional and financial incentives which contribute to grade inflation, and policies to address it must also recognize the pressure that students are under to get a job after graduation and create an environment where they feel safe failing. The value of an A lies not in its scarcity but in the fact that it represents genuine intellectual growth and engagement, and it will require effort from all of us to ensure that our academic culture reflects that.
