A new report says an increasingly higher proportion of students are getting As or passing, especially during Covid. But are they smarter than previous cohorts of students? Picture / 123RF
More university students are receiving grades in the A range than ever before, especially during Covid, but a new report suggests it has little to do with students getting smarter.
Amazing Grades, published today by think-tank The New Zealand Initiative, makes the case for grade inflation: when grades rise in a way not justified by better student performance.
Last year, 35% of all grades across all eight universities were in the A range (A- to A+), up from 22% in 2006. In 2020, when universities were being lenient in the face of Covid disruption, 49% of all Auckland University grades were in the A range.
A dip followed the 2020 spike, but the trend in the proportion of both A grades and pass marks is on the rise, while achievement among secondary school students is falling.
“It might be corruption in a very soft sense that people aren’t holding firm to an ideal of what grading should be,” said lead author Dr James Kierstead, a former Victoria University lecturer before he was made redundant in 2023.
“Largely, it’s a product of incentives operating on people, and it just means that they really have no option. That’s how I felt. It’s really a problem with the system rather than a moral problem with people.”
Those systemic issues include funding relative to student numbers, which academics are incentivised to boost by giving high grades.
“The worrying thing is that it went down after Covid, but they’re trending upwards again,” Kierstead said.
“So Covid seems to have established this ‘new normal’. The grades adjusted a bit, but they didn’t go down to the previous levels.”
He said students might end up in professions they think will suit them based on their grades, but at which they’re not actually very good.
The report lays out the potential consequences: “Fewer students will be mastering the skills and knowledge that are required for a dynamic economy and a vibrant culture. New Zealand will perform less well relative to its peer nations on a range of fronts, and the overall quality of life will suffer.”
Kierstead did not look into the standards of university graduates, but noted anecdotally that business leaders have said they struggle to get good graduates.
This was rebuffed by Universities NZ chief executive Chris Whelan: “We are unaware of any concerns raised by employers as to a mismatch of graduate skills and knowledge with their grades.”
Whelan noted several factors that should contribute to better grades, which are monitored to ensure that results reflect standards.
“We will be giving the report a more in-depth review to consider all its points, evidence and methodology.”
The report looks at the grades at all eight New Zealand universities as far back as records allow, using data mostly gathered under the Official Information Act.
It reveals the extent of the academic spike in 2020, when Covid arrived and universities made allowances for the disruption to students’ learning.
The biggest spikes occurred at Auckland and Otago, which both gave a blanket bump to all grades (from B+ to A-, for example) in semester one in 2020; 49% of all grades at Auckland in 2020 were As, while for Otago it was 40%. This was up from 32% in 2019 at each institute respectively.
Other universities took more nuanced approaches, and their 2020 spikes were not as steep.
“After Covid, A grades fell but then rebounded, especially at Waikato, Lincoln and Canterbury, where they bounced back to unprecedented heights,” the report said.
“Overall, the median proportion of A-grades grew by 13 percentage points, from 22% to 35%,” the report said.
The largest increases were at Lincoln, where the proportion of As grew from 15% in 2010 to 39% in 2024, and Massey, where they grew from 19% in 2006 to 36% in 2023.
The report also looked at A-range grades across different subject areas: the biggest Covid spike came in engineering, while there were also large increases in health, business and economics, science, education, and creative arts/design/architecture.
In the latter’s case, higher grades have continued in recent years beyond where they were in 2020. A similar pattern can be seen in the arts and humanities, where 40% of all marks were in the A range in 2024.
“The percentage of As grew in all academic disciplines, with the largest increase being in business and economics (12 percentage points) and the smallest in law (4 percentage points),” the report said.
A Covid spike is also apparent - though less pronounced - when looking at the proportion of all grades that were pass marks. Auckland and Otago, along with Lincoln and AUT, all had steeper increases than their counterparts.
“There was a much more modest increase, with the median rising only 2% from 88% to 90%,“ the report said.
The pattern since 2022 mirrors the trend for grades in the A range, with increasingly higher proportions of students passing since 2022.
“At most New Zealand universities, pass rates have clustered at around 90% for most of the past two decades,” the report said.
In 2020, this rose to over 95% for Auckland and AUT, and, while pass rates didn’t spike for Massey, it was already well ahead of the pack at 97%.
Four possible explanations are considered:
The report questions each of these, in turn:
The report also looks at grade inflation overseas, and what’s happened in New Zealand is similar in varying degrees to certain universities in Canada, England and Australia.
Kierstead told the Herald that people might see the data and think that students are performing better.
But he believes the opposite is happening.
“Anecdotally, if you talk to most academics, they’ll tell you that the standards are much, much lower than they were before. That was definitely my impression over the 10 years I was at Victoria: students actually were performing worse, and they were getting higher grades.”
He drew from his own experience at Victoria, where he said he was “regularly encouraged” to bump a student up a grade if they were within “1% or even 1.5%” of a higher grade.
Failing more than 20% of registered students would see government funding withdrawn, he said in the report.
“The difficulties didn’t end there. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that my grading for the Latin course had been too severe.”
The report contains anonymous testimonies from academics, such as a Victoria University tutor, who was told to pass all students who handed in their assessments.
One University of Auckland lecturer is reported as saying: “Administrations have made it clear that students equal funding. If your programme is perceived as too tough, your programme may lose students to other programmes.”
A statement from Auckland University said a wide range of factors contribute to improving grades. Those include better quality of teaching, student pastoral support, and more flexibility to best support how students learn.
The statement explained the Covid spike as the university prioritising helping students in what was “an extraordinarily challenging year”.
Universities NZ pointed to similar factors leading to improved student performance.
Chief executive Chris Whelan added that external markers are used to sample test grades in relevant courses, such as law.
A student also has 30-odd teachers over a three or four-year university period.
“This prevents any one academic from skewing results upwards.”
Kierstead anticipated that universities would argue they’re doing a good job, resulting in higher grades.
“But they must be doing an amazing job right because they’re getting students that we know are actually worse at literacy and math through the [OECD education] PISA scores.
“Apparently, the universities are not only kind of remedying that, they’re actually making them perform at a superb level where you get, you know, 49% A grades at the University of Auckland in 2020.
“For me, that’s just not credible.”
Kierstead said there was no silver bullet, but he had three suggestions to combat grade inflation.
“The basic dynamic at the centre of this is that students are chasing easy As, and the professors know that they’re doing this and so they’re giving out easy As in order to attract more students.
“So change the grading system so that students get less credit for easy courses.”
Secondly, bring in more external moderation.
“And then the third thing is to try to change the culture around grading. We should not think so much about kindness.
“We should think about fairness, fairness to students.”
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.