Recently, elite universities have faced criticism for the growing percentage of A’s awarded in each class. The University of Notre Dame has also seen grade inflation in the last several decades.
During the April Faculty Senate meeting, Ron Metoyer, vice president and associate provost for teaching and learning, noted recent national conversations around grade inflation may prompt a grade inflation working group at Notre Dame.
In a statement to The Observer, University provost John McGreevy said conversations about the matter were ongoing.
“Grade inflation is a complex issue facing many universities, and Notre Dame is giving it careful consideration. A faculty working group is one possible approach, but discussions are still at an early stage and no decisions have been made,” he wrote.
Notre Dame declined to share historical grade distribution data detailing the proportion of letter grades awarded each year.
“Reviewing grades over time raises interpretation and sensitivity considerations, particularly across multiple decades of policy and structural change,” Adrea Hernandez, executive director of institutional research, wrote in a statement to The Observer.
“When we refer to ‘interpretation and sensitivity considerations,’ we’re acknowledging that grade distribution data spanning multiple decades can be difficult to interpret accurately without substantial contextual information. Over time, the University has experienced changes in curriculum structures, grading policies, course formats, student populations, and academic standards. Without careful framing, comparisons across departments or time periods could lead to conclusions that are incomplete or potentially misleading,” she added. “There are also sensitivities related to how such data might be used to characterize academic units or instructors without the full context needed to understand differences in grading practices across disciplines.”
While Notre Dame does not make grade distribution available, it does publicly list historical data on the minimum GPA required for students to make the dean’s list, an honor given to students with a GPA in the top 30% each semester.
Over the last two decades, the cutoff for the dean’s list has risen across all colleges at the University. The minimum GPA to make the dean’s list for the College of Science, for instance, has risen from 3.69 in 2002 to 3.95 in 2026. The minimum for the College of Engineering has risen from 3.6 to 3.87 over the same time period.
The increase in GPAs for the Mendoza College of Business has been more modest. Since Spring 2010, Mendoza has implemented a policy in which the average GPA for the class, across sections, must be between 3 and 3.5. Despite this, the GPA cutoff for the dean’s list has continued to rise for Mendoza students from 3.69 in 2010 to 3.85 this year.
GPA requirements for Latin honors have also increased over time. Since 2005, students whose GPAs are the top 30% of their school or college are awarded cum laude, the top 15% are awarded magna cum laude, and the top 5% are awarded summa cum laude. Notably, the cutoff for summa cum laude in the College of Science hit 4.00 this year, the first time that students in any school or college at the University receiving this honor have all had exclusively A’s on their transcript.
Conversations about grade inflation are not new. Notre Dame’s Academic Council discussed the matter as early as 2000, and professors have sharply differing views on the issue.
Fr. Edward Malloy, University President Emeritus, objected to references to rising GPAs as “grade inflation.”
“Grade inflation suggests that it is something unacceptable or that it has a momentum of its own that is not desirable,” he said. “I think the quality of the Notre Dame student body has gone up significantly in my time here, and if that is the case, you would expect those students to do better.”
“Some people lament grade inflation. I think it is more a reflection of the quality of the student body and the willingness of the faculty to reward that than it is a great crisis point,” Malloy added.
Anthropology professor Susan Blum said she thought the system for student evaluation needed a radical overhaul.
“We should get rid of grades. That’s what we should do. Grades are not informative. They have never been informative. They have never been good at motivating students. They motivate through fear,” she said.
Blum said she does not support requirements for faculty to limit A’s or to grade on a curve.
“It never works. Students hate it. Teachers hate it,” she said. “This is a favorite topic, often of people with certain political positions who want to complain about students and teachers and say that students are not learning well, and that we need to be stricter.”
Blum said she believes grading on a curve effectively predetermines student success before students ever set foot in a classroom. She suggested that portfolios of student work or narrative descriptions of student performance would better represent students’ abilities.
In her classes, Blum uses a system she calls “ungrading” where she meets with students and lets them share what grade they think they deserve. She reports that many, but not all, believe they have earned an A.
“I don’t have to agree with them, but I often do,” she added.
Blum said she would quit before going back to a traditional system of grading.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz, a political science professor, said he believes grade inflation is “primarily a problem for students,” because they view anything below an A- as a failure. If an A is standard, he added, then there is no way to show truly extraordinary work.
He has written a proposal called “The Muñoz Plan to Combat Grade Inflation.” The plan, which he drafted in 1998, outlines a system that would include a new metric called grade distinction points, to be considered along with GPA.
According to Muñoz, grade distinction points are established by taking a student’s grade and subtracting the average grade.
Under the plan, average GPA for each professor and each professor’s class would be public. Academic honors including the dean’s list, Latin honors and valedictorian, would be determined on the basis of grade distinction points.
Muñoz says the system would incentivize high-performing students to take classes with professors who award lower grades on average, so that the difference between their grade and the average would be larger. He also believes that the system would encourage faculty to toughen their grading to attract high-performing students.
Theology professor Joris Geldhof said grade inflation reduces the value of receiving an A.
“If everybody gets an A, what does an A then mean in the end?” he asked.
This year was Geldhof’s first at Notre Dame. Before that he taught in Leuven, Belgium. In Belgium, he said few students get top marks, but very few students fail — most fall somewhere in the middle. At Notre Dame, by contrast, he said half of the students in a class expect to “beat the highest grade.”
Laurel Daen, an American studies professor with an area of focus in disability studies, noted higher education institutions are what disability scholars call “ableist environments,” meaning they prioritize physical and mental ability.
Grade inflation can contribute to a mentality that “everybody should be perfect all the time” often at the cost of students’ physical and mental wellbeing. However, it is not simply all negative, as it can also mitigate the effects of variable disabilities.
She also said she feels informal pressure from the University to give fewer A’s, especially in conversations around receiving tenure.
