All Intensive Purposes

Over at Crooked Timber, Harry questions the widespread perception that grade inflation is a problem in higher education:

I'm surprised by two things. First, that there doesn’t seem to be firm evidence of it. (It is interesting that Valen Johnson’s excellent book Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, for example, is not about grade inflation at all, but about grade variation and student evaluations of teaching). Second, that so many people think that there is firm evidence of it. Certainly, it appears that if you ask people—faculty and students—whether there is grade inflation, they believe there is. But that is poor evidence, because the students don’t know anything abut what happened in the past, and the faculty have faulty memories.

On average, grades have been on the rise, but as he discusses, there are other possible explanations for that.