AI is exacerbating the trend of colleges handing out too many A's, Axios' Josephine Walker reports.

AI is exacerbating the trend of colleges handing out too many A's, Axios' Josephine Walker reports.

• Why it matters: Universities and colleges were already concerned about grade inflation. But now they must worry that graduates are leaving AI-proficient rather than knowledgeable about their subjects of study.

The big picture: It isn't a case where A- students get bumped to an A, says Igor Chirikov, a UC Berkeley professor who authored a study on AI and grade inflation.

• "We have a C student who is now an A student," Chirikov tells Axios, citing his analysis of grades given between 2018 and 2025 at an unnamed Texas research university.

What they found: Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, "excellent" grades rose by 30% in classes where AI is useful, such as English composition and coding.

• In classes where it's not — like sculpture and lab-based courses — grades remained flat.
• Classes where homework was heavily weighted saw a higher rate of grade inflation, suggesting students got an AI-assisted boost.

What to watch: Professors are getting crafty with steps like requiring handwritten or oral exams.

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/16/ai...il&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Source: Axios

So there's this school teacher (high school level) who moolights at my local bar once a week. She's young, in her 20s, and dealing with a bunch of cheating kids. From her point of view the frequency of kids getting an F has gone way up due to AI. She busts them for cheating with AI, and boom, F. She's just old enough to have gotten through college before the AI slop messed everything up. She gets it, and she's going hard core against AI cheating.

Is it just me or does that article 100% look like it was AI written.

Sycraft said:

Is it just me or does that article 100% look like it was AI written.

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Do you realize how much news there is to write about AI? There's no way a human could keep up with that workload. AI is absolutely essential in the AI news world! Anyone not using it is bound for failure!!1!

/sarc

Nobu said:

Do you realize how much news there is to write about AI? There's no way a human could keep up with that workload. AI is absolutely essential in the AI news world! Anyone not using it is bound for failure!!1!

/sarc

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Ya. It annoys me and I'm not an LLM hater, I think they are useful, particularly at summarizing content. HOWEVER I feel that if you are doing that, it is extremely important you make it known that it was done with an LLM. I've used it at work to prepare summaries of things like massive program documentation. Things like "Prepare a short explanation for a technical manager what is required to install and maintain this software" and it does well for that. However I always, always note right at the top that it was generated with Claude. I'm not going to try and pass it off as my own work.

sram said:

AI is exacerbating the trend of colleges handing out too many A's, Axios' Josephine Walker reports.

• Why it matters: Universities and colleges were already concerned about grade inflation. But now they must worry that graduates are leaving AI-proficient rather than knowledgeable about their subjects of study.

The big picture: It isn't a case where A- students get bumped to an A, says Igor Chirikov, a UC Berkeley professor who authored a study on AI and grade inflation.

• "We have a C student who is now an A student," Chirikov tells Axios, citing his analysis of grades given between 2018 and 2025 at an unnamed Texas research university.

What they found: Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, "excellent" grades rose by 30% in classes where AI is useful, such as English composition and coding.

• In classes where it's not — like sculpture and lab-based courses — grades remained flat.
• Classes where homework was heavily weighted saw a higher rate of grade inflation, suggesting students got an AI-assisted boost.

What to watch: Professors are getting crafty with steps like requiring handwritten or oral exams.

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/16/ai...il&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Source: Axios

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MORE???

Nearly 80% of grades handed out at Yale are A's, study shows

https://fox11online.com/news/nation...east-ray-fair-womens-gender-sexuality-studies


Harvard says it’s been giving too many A grades to students
About 60% of the grades handed out in classes for the university’s undergraduate program are A’s, up from 40% a decade ago and less than a quarter 20 years ago.

https://fortune.com/2025/10/27/harvard-grade-inflation-students-ivy-league-education/

Sycraft said:

Is it just me or does that article 100% look like it was AI written.

Click to expand...

From what I know, AI is being utilized for news and reporting. So yes, it may be AI written. You tell AI your main idea and arguments, and it will generate a good article for you. BUT, you have to read it to make sure nothing is off or hallucinated, and like somebody else here said, you need to acknowledge it.

Sycraft said:

Is it just me or does that article 100% look like it was AI written.

Click to expand...

I didn't click on the article, but that summary is 100% AI written. The second you see any common "emotes"/symbols, especially checkmarks (ie this shit ), you should be 100% suspicious. The EM dashes with peculiar spacing like that just cement it further.

For what it's worth, from the perspective of the elite class, this is ideal. You basically got a working class that just at most needs to oversee what the machines do. That means all labor will slowly be headed down a funnel to the lowest common denominator. You don't need any trade skills if the AI owns all of the trade skills. They just need low paid prompters. Your degree becomes rubbish.

It'll be a long time before the medical profession is outdated at least (granted most of them are just in crippling debt anyway), and some spaces are safer than others, but this is what I've been telling everyone here and everywhere for years. This isn't going to have a happy ending for anyone but the upper crust.

sram said:

AI is exacerbating the trend of colleges handing out too many A's, Axios' Josephine Walker reports.

• Why it matters: Universities and colleges were already concerned about grade inflation. But now they must worry that graduates are leaving AI-proficient rather than knowledgeable about their subjects of study.

The big picture: It isn't a case where A- students get bumped to an A, says Igor Chirikov, a UC Berkeley professor who authored a study on AI and grade inflation.

• "We have a C student who is now an A student," Chirikov tells Axios, citing his analysis of grades given between 2018 and 2025 at an unnamed Texas research university.

What they found: Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, "excellent" grades rose by 30% in classes where AI is useful, such as English composition and coding.

• In classes where it's not — like sculpture and lab-based courses — grades remained flat.
• Classes where homework was heavily weighted saw a higher rate of grade inflation, suggesting students got an AI-assisted boost.

What to watch: Professors are getting crafty with steps like requiring handwritten or oral exams.

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/16/ai...il&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Source: Axios

I’ve noticed this myself with some of my coursework. There are subjects where I use AI to help me understand a difficult concept or check whether I’m approaching an assignment correctly, but I still want to understand the material myself. I’ve also used https://mysupergeek.com/psychology-assignment-help-service when I’ve been struggling with psychology assignments and need some extra help understanding what I’m supposed to do. For me, there’s a big difference between getting help with coursework and simply letting AI do everything, because the second option can make your grades look much better than your actual knowledge.

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I think AI is definitely making grade inflation harder to deal with, especially when so much of a course grade comes from homework and take home assignments. I don’t think using AI automatically means someone doesn’t understand the subject, but there’s a big difference between using it to understand something and using it to do the work for you. If a student gets an A because ChatGPT completed most of their assignments, that A doesn’t really tell you much about what they actually learned. I can also understand why professors are moving toward handwritten work and oral exams, because it gives them a better idea of what students actually know.

rinaldo00 said:

MORE???

Nearly 80% of grades handed out at Yale are A's, study shows

https://fox11online.com/news/nation...east-ray-fair-womens-gender-sexuality-studies


Harvard says it’s been giving too many A grades to students
About 60% of the grades handed out in classes for the university’s undergraduate program are A’s, up from 40% a decade ago and less than a quarter 20 years ago.

https://fortune.com/2025/10/27/harvard-grade-inflation-students-ivy-league-education/

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Hmm, I remember when it was:

A - Excellent
B - Good
C - AVERAGE
D - Needs improvement
F - Failure

By that definition, most of the grades should be about C or B. Also, a D wasn't enough to satisfy a prereq, had to pass that with at least a C.

Education theatre has problems educating people.

Next they'll write that water is wet.

Just ask students to count the amount of e's in seventeen.

Education is big business and students (and most importantly, paying parents) are the customer. The institution is giving the customer what they want, and that's the long and short of it. It's why we're having grade inflation. University administration doesn't care as long as the cheques roll in. This is a serious problem, but none of that matters because the right people are getting paid. AI will supercharge it like anything else, but this isn't an AI problem, it's an administration problem.

HockeyJon said:

this isn't an AI problem, it's an administration problem.

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Right. I'm fortunate to be a professor in a field that is very much lab-based, human anatomy. My undergrads are not allowed to use devices at all in lab given we work with donated anatomical remains (i.e., cadavers), and for my graduate and professional students, AI is not useful in gross anatomy lab for a variety of reasons. It is hilarious how on one hand some administrators complain about how many students earn Cs in lab, yet others are thrilled that at least some courses still have some rigor, and allow us to see who is highly capable, and who is not.

Gigantopithecus said:

Right. I'm fortunate to be a professor in a field that is very much lab-based, human anatomy. My undergrads are not allowed to use devices at all in lab given we work with donated anatomical remains (i.e., cadavers), and for my graduate and professional students, AI is not useful in gross anatomy lab for a variety of reasons. It is hilarious how on one hand some administrators complain about how many students earn Cs in lab, yet others are thrilled that at least some courses still have some rigor, and allow us to see who is highly capable, and who is not.

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You're teaching a real course with real practical applications that demands applied knowledge, which is key. Students can't rely on AI the way they can generating slop for humanities courses with a "studies" label on it. Honestly, universities should split STEM off of the rest of the nonsense.

HockeyJon said:

Education is big business and students (and most importantly, paying parents) are the customer. The institution is giving the customer what they want, and that's the long and short of it. It's why we're having grade inflation. University administration doesn't care as long as the cheques roll in. This is a serious problem, but none of that matters because the right people are getting paid. AI will supercharge it like anything else, but this isn't an AI problem, it's an administration problem.

Click to expand...

This.

However, nothing is free, and the grade inflation is quite expensive for the students. STEM degrees were a much better value proposition 35-40 years ago due to lower cost, much less "fluff", and more rigor. Potential employers certainly see the drop off. When I graduated with my BS if you got a plant trip, it was pretty much a job offer. Last time my team interviewed four candidates, they were terrible and zero offers were tendered.

A shame in this is the loss - young adults are capable of being pushed very hard, and if done fairly, they will excel. If coddled, some may never see their true potential.

Add in outsourcing and H1-B and you have a perfect storm. I used to be a big proponent of college stem degrees, today not so much with skilled trades looking to be a better alternative. I've met several HVAC guys who have done very well for themselves, no degree, and by their early 50's they own the outfit or are retired. No cubicles, no Office Space experience, no college debt and significant wealth.

TXE36 said:

This.

However, nothing is free, and the grade inflation is quite expensive for the students. STEM degrees were a much better value proposition 35-40 years ago due to lower cost, much less "fluff", and more rigor. Potential employers certainly see the drop off. When I graduated with my BS if you got a plant trip, it was pretty much a job offer. Last time my team interviewed four candidates, they were terrible and zero offers were tendered.

A shame in this is the loss - young adults are capable of being pushed very hard, and if done fairly, they will excel. If coddled, some may never see their true potential.

Add in outsourcing and H1-B and you have a perfect storm. I used to be a big proponent of college stem degrees, today not so much with skilled trades looking to be a better alternative. I've met several HVAC guys who have done very well for themselves, no degree, and by their early 50's they own the outfit or are retired. No cubicles, no Office Space experience, no college debt and significant wealth.

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It all depends on what you ultimately want to do and how much you want to apply yourself to it. I have a degree in mechanical engineering and you could categorize the output of the students into a few ways. One cohort was the type that seemed to be unstoppable. They had the academics and demonstrated applied knowledge to be key players in any organization they join. One of my friends has multiple patents working in aerospace. My thesis partner moved to the US to work on cutting edge defense stuff. Those guys are the real deal. Then you had another cohort of people who were good at whatever the questions were in the textbook so they could get the grades to keep up, but really had little vision when it came to applying that knowledge outside of the scope. They were good at school, just not so much outside of it. Most of the rest either failed or transferred out. Some managed to graduate and, to this day, I couldn't tell you how they managed to pull it off. For my part, I moved into sales specifically because I couldn't sit at a desk anymore and no longer wanted the Office Space experience. I still can use my technical skills, I just don't have to deal with the grind, have a lot more fun and, in a lot of cases, make more than I would have had I remained in the profession.

In any case, I wouldn't say a STEM degree is worthless in itself. It still remains probably the best door opener in higher education, especially if you're at a school with a strong network. You're not wrong in saying that you had a different type of student back then. The courses are definitely easier than they were when I was going through it. I will say, however, that the vast majority of courses in post-secondary education ARE functionally useless, and you're better off going the trades route.

TXE36 said:

A shame in this is the loss - young adults are capable of being pushed very hard, and if done fairly, they will excel. If coddled, some may never see their true potential.

Click to expand...

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to push people in educational setting. AI has good uses in education but AI will never tell you that you're fucking up and need to work smarter and harder.

Failing a lab-based course as an undergrad was the singular most important event in my career's development. The professor who taught that course and assigned my F retired recently, but I had the opportunity to email him to say thank you when I was promoted to associate professor. He said he showed his students that email every semester.

(Don't get me started on the No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Acts...)

HockeyJon said:

It all depends on what you ultimately want to do and how much you want to apply yourself to it. I have a degree in mechanical engineering and you could categorize the output of the students into a few ways. One cohort was the type that seemed to be unstoppable. They had the academics and demonstrated applied knowledge to be key players in any organization they join. One of my friends has multiple patents working in aerospace. My thesis partner moved to the US to work on cutting edge defense stuff. Those guys are the real deal. Then you had another cohort of people who were good at whatever the questions were in the textbook so they could get the grades to keep up, but really had little vision when it came to applying that knowledge outside of the scope. They were good at school, just not so much outside of it. Most of the rest either failed or transferred out. Some managed to graduate and, to this day, I couldn't tell you how they managed to pull it off. For my part, I moved into sales specifically because I couldn't sit at a desk anymore and no longer wanted the Office Space experience. I still can use my technical skills, I just don't have to deal with the grind, have a lot more fun and, in a lot of cases, make more than I would have had I remained in the profession.

In any case, I wouldn't say a STEM degree is worthless in itself. It still remains probably the best door opener in higher education, especially if you're at a school with a strong network. You're not wrong in saying that you had a different type of student back then. The courses are definitely easier than they were when I was going through it. I will say, however, that the vast majority of courses in post-secondary education ARE functionally useless, and you're better off going the trades route.

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Your experience with STEM students matches mine. I got a 4 year EE degree and returned to the same school for grad school 3 years later. During that time I taught several STEM classes with the hardest one being EE331 - this is the class on Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms plus a bit of DSP at the end. A big lesson for me is I thought taking EE331 was hard, teaching it made taking it seem like a cakewalk! You want to learn something? Teaching it to others is learning it good and hard.

Out of class of 30 or so, there would be 1-2 rockstars who were unstoppable, learned the material well and the A was just a matter of time. Typically there would 3-4 who would get it, but really had to work at it. There are your 4 As, as one of the trainable ones may end up with a B or B+.

Then there were the 3-4 who were hopeless and were never going to pass. Either unmotivated or just too far behind (sometimes from grade inflation, i.e. the Calc prof does not have time to teach a student algebra and calc at the same time).

The 20 left make up the rest of the average landing Cs to B+s. All the students are individuals and how they perform in class versus the workplace is highly variable.

A bit more about the rockstars and hard workers.

My rockstar from EE331 really impressed me. My advisor had some money available and I hired him to take data for my dissertation work. I would have been better off lighting the money on fire. The data he took was absolute crap as he just did not care - I ended up throwing it all away.

I met what turned out to be a hard worker my first day teaching in grad school. It was an electronics lab about 1/2 wave rectifiers and the school did something stupid. We had 10 week terms that had 8 labs. Students were graded on 7 of those labs, as the low score was thrown out. To save money, they went to 4 labs. Throwing one of those out was 25% of the work - I wasn't willing to do that. The prelab was one of those where a canned equation is given with a list of conditions where it is valid. Of course, this lab did not meet those conditions and nearly everybody got it wrong. Failed prelab meant a failed lab - the whole lab course. I failed everybody that got it wrong, but told them I would remove the fail if they fixed it and showed the work by the following week. Ok, enough backstory...

One of the students showed up at my office hours and was none too happy. I told him I would help him, but he had to do the work. The conversation ended with him yelling "YOU DICK!" and leaving the office. Days later he came back with some effort and needing more help, but he did figure it out - seeing the light bulb come on for students like this is very satisfying.

Over the years we built a good friendship and that guy got his BS and then entered grad school. By that time, he was a rockstar in EMAG. For those that don't know, EMAG is the deep end of electrical engineering. Those guys in the EMAG knew their stuff and could think like electrons - I miss hanging out with them.

Gigantopithecus said:

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to push people in educational setting. AI has good uses in education but AI will never tell you that you're fucking up and need to work smarter and harder.

Failing a lab-based course as an undergrad was the singular most important event in my career's development. The professor who taught that course and assigned my F retired recently, but I had the opportunity to email him to say thank you when I was promoted to associate professor. He said he showed his students that email every semester.

(Don't get me started on the No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Acts...)

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I SO like this. Some of this may be a bit off topic, but thinking about this has resurface some good college memories.

Easy A's versus hard fought B's:

Thermodynamics for me was an easy A with almost no effort. Prof eval at the time: This guy is great!

Dynamics was a chore. Lots of time spent with the prof during office hours. Lots of studying. Started out with a bad first exam and it cost me an A, getting a B+ by the end of the course. Prof eval at the time: This guy is fair.

Skip forward a year. I signed up to take the EIT (Engineer in Training, the first of two exams to become a Professional Engineer). The exam had a core in electrical engineering and two "optional" ones. One of those options was dynamics, the other was thermo. When I signed up, the exam was a long way off, I forgot about it, but it came fast - I had only a week to study for it.

Looked at thermo, could not make heads or tails of it. I was stunned, I completely forgot how to use a steam table. Thermo was no hope.

Looked at dynamics - I could do the sample dynamics problems without even cracking the textbook. It was a stunning moment, holy shit I actually learned this!

The thermo guy gave me an A and zero practical knowledge. The dynamics guy gave me a B+, but I learned dynamics. I've thought ever since then that profs should be evaluated 2-3 years after the class, not on the last day..

One more grad inflation related story.

I went back to grad school after working in aerospace for three years, so I was not a typical grad student that went from undergrad into grad. I went back to the same school and had a GTA. My supervisor was the prof who taught my very first college EE class. Doc W was a fantastic prof and great guy. One of the labs I was assigned to teach was known as "EE for non-believers", it was the EE class the MEs and other engineering students had to take (EE221 or something). What I did not know is that it was traditionally a blow off class, an easy A.

I taught it just like I taught any other EE class. 2-3 weeks into the term I walk into the EE office and the secretary said "You need to go up and see Doc W". I'm thinking what did I screw up. Go to his office and he says close the door and I'm thinking "oh shit".

"I've been getting complaints from several of your EE221 students, they are saying you are being too hard." "Oh" I, replied. He came back with "I told them to get the hell out of my office, but I wanted you to know. It's about time that class was taught seriously." Damn that was a nice complement coming from someone I highly respected. Also fused well with the memory that my ME class for non-believers was hardly a blow off class.

And my EE221 students did well. One question I never liked getting in a lab was "is this right?". My response was always the same "Well, is it?" usually followed up by "Well, what did you expect? What did the pre-lab predict?" Once the conversation got going between the lab partners, I would just walk way. One of the toughest things about real engineering on new stuff is evaluating "is this right" when there is literally nobody to ask because you are the sole expert on whatever the widget is.

Eh... getting As in college isnt really that big of a deal IMO, no job interview is going to want to see your class rank. Hell they may not even care if you graduated as long as you have experience or can show them something.

Grade inflation is more for colleges to brag about how good students are who go there, but its mostly a problem at the high school level because there the grades do correlate to "doing good"

sfsuphysics said:

Eh... getting As in college isnt really that big of a deal IMO, no job interview is going to want to see your class rank. Hell they may not even care if you graduated as long as you have experience or can show them something.

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That's exactly the point of the diminishing value of degrees these days. I've worked at big engineering companies in the 80s, 90,s and early 2000s that would not consider new engineering grads unless their GPA was 3.5 or above. I could not get a tech who was working for me at a company promoted to an engineer because he did not have a 4 year degree even though he was more talented than most of the engineers.

Those As used to be a big deal and the financial cost of the degree was a hell of a lot less.

Today, your second sentence is true in a lot of places these days because GPA doesn't mean much anymore.

sfsuphysics said:

Grade inflation is more for colleges to brag about how good students are who go there, but its mostly a problem at the high school level because there the grades do correlate to "doing good"

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Grade inflation in HS was a huge problem in the late 1980s. I can't imagine what a clown show it is now.

TXE36 said:

That's exactly the point of the diminishing value of degrees these days. I've worked at big engineering companies in the 80s, 90,s and early 2000s that would not consider new engineering grads unless their GPA was 3.5 or above. I could not get a tech who was working for me at a company promoted to an engineer because he did not have a 4 year degree even though he was more talented than most of the engineers.

Those As used to be a big deal and the financial cost of the degree was a hell of a lot less.

Today, your second sentence is true in a lot of places these days because GPA doesn't mean much anymore.


Grade inflation in HS was a huge problem in the late 1980s. I can't imagine what a clown show it is now.

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I never had a college degree, and in the tech world, it's a horrible thing to not have. I probably lost a lot of opportunities, even though I worked in some of the most well known tech companies out there. What good is a Psychology degree in tech? My last job was 9 years ago, and my boss was kind of racist (she only wanted to hire good English speakers), and wouldn't hire anyone who didn't graduate from a "good" college. It didn't matter what their grades were. It's crazy how I got to where I was without a college degree, yet here I am. Jobless, yet still doing quite well.

It'll be interested to see how things turn out, with what's left of the Boomer generation still clutching to the reins.

TXE36 said:

Grade inflation in HS was a huge problem in the late 1980s. I can't imagine what a clown show it is now.

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One semester I was lured to a "college prep" high school with promises of 98% acceptance rates to 4 year colleges, and they wanted a college level physics course to help pad those CVs... this wasnt even calculus based it was a conceptual level. Halfway through the semester I told the principal that these students were not ready for that class much less college classes in general, only thing I got was a request to let them know which students had no chance of passing the class and all those students were removed and placed into another class. It wasnt specifically grade inflation but it was controlling the outcome of their pass rates... needless to say they didn't ask me back, never have I been so happy to lose a job