مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

More than 78% of employers use undergraduate grade point average (GPA) to screen job candidates (NACE, n.d.). While collegiate GPA makes the short list of influential factors in the selection process of most employers, there is unfortunately little evidence of its use for any purpose beyond a simple initial screening mechanism for narrowing an applicant pool.

A job candidate’s GPA is a problematic metric for prospective employers. The potential of GPA to indicate students’ relative academic performance is being negated by the damage done by grade inflation. Grade inflation refers to the ongoing rise in the percentage of high grades assigned to students, leading directly to higher student GPAs. This rise in grades occurs without evidence of commensurate increases in student learning. The welldocumented and avoidable phenomenon of grade inflation limits the ability of employers to distinguish superior academic performers from the majority of their classmates who have also received high grades.

gh grades. For decades, grade inflation has been reported at a wide range of four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. Yet,the grade inflation problem is worsening. Grade inflation has been recorded at all schools that were studied and was especially pronounced at ‘better’ and private colleges and universities where GPAs are habitually the highest (Popov & Bernhardt, 2011; Tucker & Courts, 2010). The resulting compression of grade distribution has led to a hemorrhaging of credibility in the grading process, as students with differing levels of achievement arecompressed into the upper groupings of the grade distribution. This article explores the causes and consequences of grade inflation and offers possible explanations for professors’ elevated judgments of student performance relative to their classmates. However, it does not evaluate how much students learned as measured against an absolute standard. In collegiate education, absolute standards for gauging student performance very rarely exist.