New Zealand should consider giving students context-specific marks or introducing national exams in some subjects to combat spiralling grade inflation, according to a new report.

The study, , draws on grade distributions from the country¡¯s eight public universities.

It shows that the proportion of A-range grades has jumped from 22 per cent in 2006 to 35 per cent in 2024 ¨C with nearly half of all grades at the University of Auckland falling in the top category at the height of the Covid pandemic.

¡°An A grade of today doesn¡¯t represent the same level of achievement that it did in the past,¡± Douglas?Elliffe, professor of psychology at the University of Auckland, writes?in the foreword to the report.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

He says that although the rise could well be explained partly by academics getting better at teaching over the years, the ¡°ethic of kindness has been an important driver of grade inflation¡±.

The pandemic in particular ¡°brought to the fore a feeling that we as academics should be more sensitive to the various difficulties that our students face, give more attention to pastoral care, and avoid damaging our students¡¯ sense of their own worth¡±.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

¡°It¡¯s not surprising that we may have reacted to that with the apparently simple solution of grading more generously,¡± Elliffe adds.

The report argues that the steep rise reflects ¡°the incentives academics have to give out higher grades as a way of keeping student numbers up¡±.

Universities¡¯ reliance on student fees, combined with government funding tied to enrolments, means staff are discouraged from failing or disappointing too many students.

James?Kierstead, a former classics lecturer at Victoria University and the report¡¯s co-author, recalls being told not to fail more than 20 per cent of students, with colleagues urging him to round up marks that fell just short of higher grade boundaries.

¡°The way I very quickly came to grade students¡­was mainly a product of incentives, incentives that were generated by the system I was operating in,¡± he writes.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

The report argues that better moderation of grades could be one solution. Students could be told, for example, what the class average was and how far their mark was above or below it. The difficulty level of a course or the talent of the cohort overall could also be made clear, it adds.

¡°The idea here is that if students know that any As they obtain by taking easy courses will count less in terms of their GPA, they will be less eager to take those courses.¡±

National exams could also be considered, the report says, giving the example of Germany that has state exams for students studying certain courses such as medicine and law.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

New Zealand could do the same, it suggests, initially in the same fields but ¡°we might want to consider also having national exams in other well-established academic fields too¡±.

Other changes include reducing the importance of student evaluations of university teaching and a need to change the culture within universities from one of ¡°kindness¡± to one ¡°fairness¡±.

The New Zealand figures on grade inflation mirror trends elsewhere. In England, the proportion of first-class degrees rose from 8 per cent in the mid-1990s to a peak of 36 per cent in 2020-21. In the US, A has replaced C as the most common grade at four-year colleges, with nearly 80 per cent of marks at Harvard and Yale universities now in the A range.

Grade inflation, it argues, carries real costs. Employers find it harder to distinguish between excellent and merely competent graduates.

ÌÇÐÄVlog

Students who work harder risk seeing their efforts devalued. And the credibility of a New Zealand degree internationally?could?suffer if grade distribution is seen as inflated.

tash.mosheim@timeshighereducation.com