In 1986, the mean undergraduate grade point average at Penn was 3.10 — a figure The Daily Pennsylvanian pointed to as grade inflation that made “traditional definitions of letter grades obsolete.”
University officials told the DP that the high grading practices originated in the 1960s and proposed several different explanations.
One suggested that professors rewarded too many high grades to undergraduates because they also taught graduate students, and the grading culture for graduate programs tended to exclude marks lower than a B. The problem was magnified in classes with mixed undergraduate and graduate enrollment.
Another suggested that inflation was a more rampant problem among the humanities because the subject matter and respective testing materials — consisting largely of essays — tended to demand more subjective grading systems.
A biology professor pointed out that some courses were more difficult than others, and no official department policies existed. Still, the average grade in natural sciences such as biology and chemistry exceeded 2.8.
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