Whose fault is it? Assigning blame for grade inflation in higher education

This study attempts to isolate the potential sources of grade inflation and to measure their relative importance. We incorporate existing models of grade inflation into a model of grade inflation at the department level. Our data comprise 1683 separate courses taught in 28 different academic departments by 3176 distinct instructors at a large public university over two decades. Our results suggest that incentives to inflate grades vary according to characteristics of academic departments. However, the vast majority (over 90%) of grade inflation observed in our data is estimated to be a result of either university-level factors or instructor-specific characteristics.