Grade inflation

Stuart Rojstaczer, a professor at Duke, has a depressing, but honest and accurate piece in the Washington Post about grade inflation.

A’s are common as dirt in universities nowadays because it’s almost impossible for a professor to grade honestly. If I sprinkle my classroom with the C’s some students deserve, my class will suffer from declining enrollments in future years. In the marketplace mentality of higher education, low enrollments are taken as a sign of poor-quality instruction. I don’t have any interest in being known as a failure.
Parents and students want high grades. Given that students are consumers of an educational product for which they pay dearly, I am expected to cater to their desires not just to be educated well but to receive a positive reward for their enrollment. So I don’t give C’s anymore, and neither do most of my colleagues. And I can easily imagine a time when I’ll say the same thing about B’s.

The incentive system is clear: inflate marks or pay a penalty.
This is not an American phenomenon. Marks (we say marks, not grades, on this side of the Atlantic) over here are being inflated badly, and for pretty much the same reason. The farce is listening to some fat-headed professor who sneers about American grade inflation, and then raises his marks across the board. I see them (a lot of them) every year.