Grade Inflation Effects of Administrative Policies.

Grade inflation can be a problem when the inflation degrades in- formation in the grade point average. That is, grade inflation can produce artificially high grade point averages which lead to student performance evaluations which have no meaning (Levine 1994). Employers who use grades to ration recruiting efforts are faced with a shifting meaning to the grade data. A recruiter who limits interviews to students with grade averages above a given minimum has a different pool of students above the minimum from year to year. Steps should be taken to identify incentives and administrative practices that encourage grade inflation. Remedial steps should then be taken to restore information content to the grade point average. When the school imposed a minimum grade point average in upper division accounting, the rule had the potential to alter the distribution of grades. There was not a winnowing out of lower performing students. Instead, these students got better grades. Instructors seemed reluctant to give poor grades to lower performing students.