College grades can influence a student’s graduation prospects, academic motivation, postgraduate job choice, professional and graduate school selection, and access to loans and scholarships. Despite the importance of grades, national trends in grading practices have not been examined in over a decade, and there has been a limited effort to examine the historical evolution of college grading. This article looks at the evolution of grading over time and space at American colleges and universities over the last 70 years. The data provide a means to examine how instructors’ assessments of excellence, mediocrity, and failure have changed in higher education.

This article challenges schools of education to implement credible and meaningful grading systems to combat pervasive grade inflation.

This report describes a "crisis" in teacher relations (a controversy about grading) and the practice of collaboration as it is revealed in this crisis. The discussion highlights the importance of teacher teams' maintaining their planned focus.

There is a growing consensus as to the need for revising instruction in assessment at the preservice and in-service levels. After discussing the mismatch between instructional priorities in measurement courses and the perceived needs of teachers, the author proposes seven general assessment topics that need more attention in teacher education.

In this article, we offer a look at how homework is handled in two families. We offer one regressive scene and one that is more successful, and situate both as sensible adaptations to a community of pressures.

This article discusses the differences between formal education and a newer educational age, in which pluralistic models of schooling will be thoughtfully matched with pluralistic models of evaluation.

Here we report on historical and recent grading patterns at American four-year colleges and universities. Records of average grades show that since the 1960s, grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public-commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade. These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technology.