The average GPA at WashU increased from 3.37 in 2004 to 3.68 in 2025. (Mason Sutton | Designer)

In September of this year, WashU’s Olin Business School created new grading guidelines, recommending that professors assign letter grades so that they average out to an equivalent of 3.3 or 3.4 GPA in required classes and 3.5 or 3.6 in elective classes, Vice Dean of Education Todd Gormley told Student Life via email. 

Olin’s new guidelines were created in part to combat a decades-long trend of increasing GPAs at WashU. While WashU does not publish data on grades, Student Life compiled some data from annual WashU Greek Life academic reports. These reports list University-wide average GPA as a comparison point for the GPAs of students in specific fraternities and sororities. 

The University-wide average GPA rose from 3.37 in fall 2004 to 3.57 in fall 2019. It increased rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic — by spring 2021, it reached 3.73. 

Since then, it has decreased slightly, to 3.69 in fall 2024 and 3.68 in spring 2025, according to Greek Life reports, meaning if professors in Olin choose to follow the new suggested guidelines, it could result in a significant drop in student GPAs. 

Rising grades are not new; average grades at universities nationwide have been increasing since the 1960s. Debates over the causes of this grade increase, whether it constitutes a problem, and what to do about it, have existed for decades at WashU.  

However, as elite universities face increasing national scrutiny, grade increases at these schools have increasingly drawn attention. In late October, a Harvard University report found that most students at the school receive A grades despite low class attendance — sparking debate in major news outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Additionally, the Trump administration’s recently proposed Compact for Higher Education — which WashU declined to sign — stipulated that schools must not inflate or deflate grades and must publicly display relevant data on grades, among other provisions. 

When average grades rise without a proportional improvement in academic performance, this trend is called grade inflation. 

Proponents of the grade inflation explanation argue that academic rigor is declining, and therefore that increasing averages are not merited. Critics argue that the increase can instead be attributed to better teaching and hard working students.  

WashU’s Vice Provost for Educational Initiatives Jennifer Smith believes grades no longer accurately reflect students’ mastery of a subject. 

“I’m simultaneously hearing from faculty concerns that student knowledge or skills are not what they should be or were, and yet grades are higher than they’ve ever been,” Smith said. “People are saying, ‘I’m covering less material, simplifying exams,’ things like that.” 

Within the standard A-F letter-grade system, a C is the midpoint. However, several professors at WashU told Student Life that they do not award this grade to their average student because they believe it could cause disproportionate amounts of stress. 

“I don’t tend to use the C as an average point in my intro courses,” Chair of Undergraduate Studio Art Meghan Kirkwood said. “If you’ve been showing up and putting in a solid effort, it’s reasonable to expect you’re working toward a B.” 

She said that students are often not satisfied with any grade other than an A.

“Students often see a B grade as a kind of failure or a message that they didn’t do well in the class,” Kirkwood said.  

From the data, it is clear that WashU students are receiving higher grades than in the past. Student Life sought to investigate whether this upward trend is reflective of higher-quality work or grade inflation.

What are grades for and how are they used?

Student Life compiled the perspectives of seven WashU faculty members via interviews and articles written for other publications on grade increases and inflation. In interviews, we asked about faculty members’ beliefs about the fundamental purpose of grades.

Some faculty believe grades measure a student’s mastery of a subject. Others argue that grades serve to differentiate students from one another. 

Jason Gardner, a lecturer in philosophy, sees grades as a tool of “comparative evaluation” for hiring and admissions committees, though he sees percentiles and class rank as more informative than raw GPA.

Gardner said he mostly gives A’s and high B’s to his students on graded assignments and that most students finish his course with a low A — which translates to a 3.7 in the grade-point system. 

“I try not to make the grades very low or harsh because I don’t want people to feel like they can’t do the thing, [but] I don’t want to give an easy A because I want to leave room for every student to be able to keep trying to do better,” Gardner said.

Brett Green, a professor of finance, oversaw the creation of Olin’s new grade guidelines. He told Student Life that differences in grades provide important information to employers, and limiting the range of scores that students receive detracts from this purpose. 

“If everybody’s getting very high grades, it becomes hard to distinguish talent or learn [anything] meaningful from them, then employers are going to rely on other sources of information to figure out who they want to hire,” Green said. 

Smith thinks aligning grades with the amount of material learned is more important than ensuring grades differ between students. 

“Have you mastered this material? Can you use it? That’s all I need to know,” Smith said. “I don’t need to know that you can do it better than that guy.”

What is causing average grades to increase at WashU?

Interviews with relevant stakeholders pointed to a few hypotheses to explain the rise in GPA. 

For instance, some faculty have felt pressure from students to increase their grades. Ian Bogost,  professor and director of film and media studies as well as a professor of computer science and engineering, wrote about grade inflation in The Atlantic.

“As a professor at another elite private university, who has been teaching undergraduates for more than 20 years, I have surely been guilty of inflating grades,” Bogost wrote in the article. “I have also endured the confusing wrath of students who seem to think we professors are ruining their lives by awarding only 60% of each class with A’s.”

Bogost also wrote that course evaluation surveys may incentivize faculty to give higher grades, especially if they are non-tenured. 

“Those surveys are, in turn, notoriously unsound as a measure of learning, but they do exert pressure to make students happy. And you know what makes a student happy? Giving them an A,” Bogost wrote in the article. 

Kirkwood said that she had not personally received feedback on her course evaluations that led her to want to change her grading policies, but could see how it might pressure faculty to give higher grades.

A 2024 Student Life investigation examining biases and inaccuracies in WashU’s course evaluations system found that some faculty members consider course evaluation ratings when assigning grades. An anonymous faculty member quoted in the article said that they “[hesitate] to give grades lower than A-/B+ even when lower grades would be well-deserved.”

Smith said that WashU does not look at professors’ grade distributions when considering them for tenure, but does consider course evaluations. 

Beyond course evaluations, student feedback can impact faculty in other ways. 

“I think a lot of faculty have had scary experiences with failing students who have financial and political power, who push back hard,” Gardner said. “After you’ve been through something like that a time or two, it sticks in your head what you’re going to have to go through if you fail the wrong student here.”

Gardner said students frequently come to him to argue back points on essays. He is generally open to hearing these arguments if presented in a timely manner but does not accommodate requests to have final grades rounded up at the end of the semester.

Kirkwood said that the same thing has been happening more and more toward the end of the semester in her classes, with students experiencing an “end-of-semester panic” and coming to her with requests to change grades from earlier in the semester. 

In 2023, Liberty Vittert, a professor of the practice of data science, identified a similar trend of student dissatisfaction with grades, writing in an op-ed that she has received accusations of bias and discrimination when she has given out bad grades. 

“The administrators at these universities are so afraid of their own student body that they will throw the professors to the wolves — that is, straight to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) dean — if there is so much as a whiff of an accusation,” she wrote in The Hill. 

Vittert told Student Life that she is unable to comment for this article because she is on maternity leave. 

However, Eric Fournier, the director of educational development at WashU’s Center for Teaching and Learning, believes some of the critiques of grade inflation are misplaced. 

“Some of the criticism about grading … is more broadly about just kids these days. ‘Have they got it easy?’ ‘They’re too soft.’ ‘There’s not enough rigor,’” Fournier said. “I don’t really see the validity of that criticism when I look at the work that students are doing.” 

Fournier believes grades have risen partially because faculty are teaching better, pointing to the increasing presence of Centers for Teaching and Learning at universities nationwide. While he used to teach at Samford University, Fournier currently advises professors in his current role at WashU. 

“When I started my own career, I would write multiple-choice questions with intentionally difficult questions: ‘I know nobody’s going to get this one, this is so hard.’” Fournier said. “People have started changing their practices from having these gotcha questions and just [offering] more chances for students to show what they know.”

Gardner has been involved with the University since 2006, when he began his graduate studies, and he has also taught at other universities both in the area and across the country. He thinks that higher grades at WashU may be due to the highly motivated student body as well as support systems that have been implemented during his time at WashU.

“The students [at WashU] are less likely to fail on their own merits, and the institution itself is full of all of these resources that coddle and help students,” Gardner said. 

In the spring of 2023, the school implemented an early alert system that allows professors to flag students who are not doing well in their courses early on. These reports go to the Office of the Provost and sometimes result in mental health checkups or referrals to other support systems on campus. Before this system was implemented, the administration encouraged faculty to email the student’s advisor with concerns. 

Janie Brennan, the associate chair of undergraduate education in McKelvey’s department of energy, environmental, and chemical engineering, said grade inflation may be due to a more competitive student body.

“Since 30 years ago, [WashU] has become a more elite school,” Brennan said. “I love teaching WashU students. It’s a huge privilege, … but I do think it means that you tend to get more of the students that are going to [do] everything they can to get that high score.” 

Brennan added that, in general, students in her classes who received an A had earned it. 

Looking ahead

There are several alternatives to the current grading system, including getting rid of grades altogether, using a pass-fail system, reporting grades as percentages, including the class average on students’ transcripts alongside their grade, or even giving an  A+ a weight of 4.3. Others have simply suggested leaving grades as-is while making the classes themselves harder. 

Another proposed solution is a curved grading distribution in which the number of A’s, B’s, and C’s assigned in a class have preset quotas, as Princeton University implemented in 2004. They eventually abandoned the policy in 2014 because it was deterring applicants, increasing students’ anxiety, and encouraging students to take only easier classes, among other reasons. 

Smith said she thinks such curves are unfair to students.  

“If you [have] that sophisticated understanding of material, you should be able to get an A. And if everybody does that, fantastic, everybody should get an A,” Smith said. 

Smith said that any change to a grading system resulting in lower grades risks disadvantaging  students after graduation.

“We do worry about impacting our students; med school, law school, grad school, [institutions] that care about GPAs,” Smith said. “If somebody were going to do something about this, it would have to be some sort of collective action.” 

When asked if he was concerned that the new Olin guidelines could hurt graduates, Green said this was something he discussed in depth with the Career Center. They concluded that implementing these new grading guidelines could be beneficial since students will have a standardized reference point for their grades when applying for jobs.  

In addition to teaching and chairing in the undergraduate Studio Art department, Kirkwood also occasionally participates in admissions for the graduate program at WashU. She said that while GPA is a factor that they consider, portfolio and other experiences are more important.

Student impact 

Gardner said he is concerned that grades are distracting students from learning. 

“I worry about the role grades play in students’ lives, and I’m bothered by the fact that a lot of students are more concerned about the grade than they are concerned about the skills and the content that they can get out of the course,” he said.

Kirkwood expressed a similar view, suggesting that students prioritizing grades to such an extreme fails to prepare them for life after graduation.

“Just doing A-level work isn’t going to make you the best in the field,” she said. “[There is no] scale for that kind of [success] because it requires a kind of effort beyond the A, a drive that keeps you up at night, keeps you coming back, and keeps you asking a new question or challenging or pushing yourself,” she said.

Both Kirkwood and Gardner recognize grades are a big point of stress for students at WashU and are worried about student well-being. 

Green believes that a lack of differences in students’ grades can cause them to prioritize extracurriculars and other activities over academics in order to distinguish themselves.

“Employers are going to do more of their own screening. This is going to take students out of the classroom at an earlier phase, arguably a very critical stage of their academic careers,” he said. “I found myself challenged at times with just getting people to really focus on the classroom.” 

Sophomore Brandon Chang, a student at Olin who is involved in WashU Student Investment Fund, Olin Business Council, WashU Investment Banking Association, and WashU Consult Your Community, among other organizations, said he feels he needs extracurriculars to find a job.

“A lot of the business classes are helpful for your critical thinking development, but they don’t really teach you the skills necessary for a job environment,” Chang said. “Conceptually, [classes] teach you some pretty good things, but you don’t really get much practice applying them.” 

Chang said that despite his extracurriculars, he spends a lot of time on academics and feels he has to consistently work hard to get an A in his classes. 

Junior Justin Krelitz is majoring in biochemistry and minoring in English literature, and he says he doesn’t think A’s come easily in either subject. 

“I’ve done well in all my English classes, but it’s always like, the first essay is really brutal, and then you have to adjust. … It’s not particularly indulgent or flexible,” he said. 

Krelitz hopes for a more holistic approach to grading and described one of his professor’s approaches to grades. 

“Her mentality was I think the right one — it wasn’t ‘oh, they did this minor, tiny thing wrong, I’m going to dock points,’” Krelitz said. “It was [more] ‘do they have the right overall concept.’” 

Smith said she felt one of the most “toxic” things about grade inflation is how it causes students to set unreasonable expectations for themselves. 

“It contributes to a toxic perfectionism. I cannot tell you how absurd I find it that people will switch classes that they are getting [an] A- in to pass-fail,” Smith said.

“Who says everybody is supposed to be excellent at everything?” she continued. “I think it is not good for students to think that the only acceptable grade is an A.”