Grade Inflation

In The Death of Expertise, grade inflation is one of the central mechanisms by which higher education stops producing knowledge and starts producing the illusion of it. Tom Nichols’s two “most important facts about grade inflation” are “that it exists and that it suffuses students with unwarranted confidence in their abilities” — the same confidence-without-competence dynamic that, scaled up, fuels the book’s larger thesis about the collapse of respect for expertise. Kyle flagged this directly in his margin notes: “Increasing your confidence without increasing your performance.”

Nichols ties the inflation to the consumer model of college: when students “view themselves as a consumer, and the product as a credential, rather than an education,” professors face students who “shamelessly demand to be given good grades, regardless of their work ethic.” His blunt formulation — “When college is a business, you can’t flunk the customers” — frames grade inflation as a structural consequence of treating the degree as a purchased good. The result is graduates who leave campus “with less knowledge than they’ve been led to believe,” a credential that overstates the underlying skill.

Context: Grade inflation refers to the documented long-run rise in average grades awarded at U.S. colleges and universities without a corresponding rise in student achievement, such that a top grade now signals far less relative distinction than it once did.

Where this appears

• The Death of Expertise — Nichols uses grade inflation as evidence that the consumer/credential model of college inflates confidence without raising competence.