Proceedings of The 7th World Conference on Teaching and Education
Year: 2024
DOI:
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A Case Study in Grade Inflation During COVID and Thereafter in a University
Douglas R Moodie
ABSTRACT:
This case study reports on the mean course grade for all undergraduate students in all courses from 2015 to 2023 split by different student demographics, teaching modalities, time, and other student and course characteristics at Kennesaw State University. The research used all the millions of records of every course and student interaction from 2015 to 2023. These recorded course modality, course term and year, student age sex, ethnicity, previous courses taken, as well as instructor and final course grades. The analysis first discarded all courses with only satisfactory or unsatisfactory grades, as well as records where the student withdrew. The analysis shows that there was a sharp rise in mean course grades during Covid. This rise has only partly come back down to 2019 levels during 2021 to 2023. The analysis also showed that for nearly all combinations of demographics, females di better than males. Hybrid modality courses produced higher grades for nearly all types of students. These results suggest that grade inflation is a real phenomenon which was made worse by Covid. Thus, researchers must be careful in using final course grade in different years as an indicator of learning outcomes.
keywords: course grades: Covid; demographics; hybrid; online