In December, the Educational Plans and Policies Committee sent a document to College faculty that included a draft for College-wide guidelines on grading. The proposed guidelines are intended to curb grade inflation — the incremental increase in the average grade awarded — and reduce grade compression, which is the increase in the percentage of grades awarded within a narrow range. The document has spurred conversation among faculty about grading practices and the philosophy of grading in general.
Chair of the EPPC, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Chair of Religion Corey Barnes, OC ’98, said the guidelines were developed in response to data that revealed a pattern of grade inflation and compression at Oberlin. He noted that the percentage of A and A+ grades had increased between the 2017–2018 and 2024–2025 school years, while the percentage of all other grades had decreased.
Barnes declined to share the drafted guidelines with the Review. He said the EPPC was still receiving faculty responses and making revisions to the document before it goes to the General Faculty for approval. Barnes emphasized that the proposed changes would not affect instructors’ ability to grade at their own discretion.
“Grading is ultimately subject to the instructor’s expertise and professional judgment in alignment with institutional norms,” he wrote in an email to the Review.
In recent years, grade inflation and compression have become a major subject of discourse at institutions of higher education across the country. Recently, Harvard University proposed capping the number of A’s given to students and discussed introducing an A+ after it was revealed that two-thirds of their students received A’s. Critics of grade inflation and compression argue that higher grades diminish the ability for students to receive recognition for their work.
“Grade inflation and compression make it difficult to distinguish excellent work from good work and make it impossible to distinguish exceptional work from excellent work,” Barnes wrote.
Many professors, including Barnes and Chair of Psychology Cindy Frantz, also say that higher grades counterintutively lead to more anxiety for students.
“One thing that comes up is that student expectations and the student perspective has really shifted,” Frantz said. “So we’re now in a situation where we can have students crying in our offices because they got [an] A-. From our perspective, an A- is a good grade, but from the student perspective, it’s not.”
Frantz also expressed concerns that junior faculty might feel pressure from students to grade more generously because student evaluations impact tenure decisions, though she said there is no evidence to support that giving lower grades decreases chances of0 becoming tenured.
Most professors who spoke with the Review reported having mixed feelings about the process of grading and said the discussion around grade inflation has forced them to have broader conversations about the philosophy and function of grading more generally.
“The fact that [the] EPPC publishes this doesn’t prevent us or release us from the need to have a broader discussion among faculty and with students about what grading is for and [the] kinds of different contexts in which we grade,” Professor of Hispanic Studies and Program Director of Latin American Studies Sebastiaan Faber said.
Associate Professor of Religion and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Emilia Bachrach, who is also a member of EPPC, agreed.
“I think the more essential question that both faculty and students should be asking in response to observations about grade inflation is this: What are grades for in the first place? Whom do they serve, and to what ends?” Bachrach wrote in an email to the Review. “These are not my questions — they have emerged from my conversations with colleagues and students alike. They are neither easy to answer, nor do I believe there is a single answer to begin with. Regardless of any College-wide observations or guidelines around grading, they are questions I believe we should all be asking.”
Faber said he is not convinced that grade inflation is necessarily a problem. Both he and Frantz pointed to the fact that the College has made improvements to its pedagogical methods in recent years, including changes to the academic calendar, better syllabi, an enhanced pass/no pass system, and the promotion of learning resources such as peer tutors.
“There’s a really good argument that I agree with that if you have high standards and you do a really good job of teaching your class, maybe everybody does get an A, but it’s because they’ve really learned, and they’ve really excelled, and they’ve achieved your expectations,” Frantz said.
However, Frantz said that grades have a practical use in distinguishing students, which grade inflation has made more difficult. In particular, she said grade inflation has caused letters of recommendation to take on greater importance and has made writing these letters more difficult.
“You don’t typically write negative things in letters of recommendation,” Frantz said. “However, I can use superlatives to say this person had the highest performance that semester in my statistics class. I can say that because I have grades. I can look, and I can see that that statement means something.”
Almost all faculty acknowledged that grade inflation at Oberlin was part of a larger culture spanning from high school to higher education. Chair and Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Lisa Ryno cautioned that in considering grade inflation at Oberlin, faculty should be aware how students’ GPAs affect their competitiveness for opportunities outside the College.
“One thing I, and others, have been thinking about, as we consider how to ‘reign in’ grade inflation is how this could impact students beyond Oberlin if other institutions are not addressing the issue of a continuously rising average GPA,” Ryno wrote in an email to the Review. “For example, GPA[s] and [specifically] STEM class GPA[s] are major factors in the decision-making process for admitting students into M.D. and other health- and STEM-related graduate programs. While we can contextualize our grading in letters of recommendation, whether an application goes far enough in the process to have those letters read, or if there are GPA-based filters ahead of those letters being read, is unknown.”
Chair and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and Professor of English Geoff Pingree connected grade inflation to the growing cost of college and students’ desires to make their investment pay off, which is at times at odds with professors’ standards.
“The fact that we give too many A’s seems to me to be directly related to the growing distance between the aims of professors, students, and academic institutions,” Pingree wrote in an email to the Review. “Because of this, I would like to see more open discussion about these conflicting interests and about the fundamental questions of what grading is for, and why and how we do it now, today, in 2026. I think that Oberlin’s faculty, students, and administrators are, compared to their peers at many other colleges and universities, generally more aligned in their values and beliefs about what a college education is for. But even at Oberlin, the growing divergence of these fundamental interests is real and consequential.”
Overall, faculty were supportive of the guidelines, if only because they force teachers to think critically about their grading practices.
“You can’t tell faculty to just give harder grades,” Frantz said. “That’s not the appropriate fix. I don’t know what the appropriate fix is. I just think, from my perspective as a faculty member, we need to make sure that we are being thoughtful and intentional and doing the best job we can as educators.”
