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The purpose of this paper is to determine whether students perceive grade inflation as a problem. It questions whether differences exist in perceptions based upon gender and grade point average (GPA).

Previously validated scales were used to assess perceptions. The sample included 108 full-time traditional-aged undergraduate students from a private university.

Students do not believe A grades are given more than deserved; however, they believe some receive higher grades than deserved. Grades are seen as an accurate reflection of achievement. Neither gender nor GPA differences were found on grade inflation perceptions, although women believe faculty give higher grades to receive better student evaluations.

This paper combines student perceptions about grade inflation and analysis by gender and GPA.

This paper focuses on the factors related to faculty workload in the context of resource scarcity to examine whether there is a relationship between them and grade inflation.

As for methodological novelty, the authors created an indicator of students' expectations about grades that is related to grade inflation and conducted regression analysis using cluster-robust error correction based on this indicator.

The results suggested that proper workload allocation among the faculty can mitigate grade inflation. Namely, such measures as control for concurrent courses, the length of courses and the labor intensity of the faculty are suggested for grade inflation prevention.

Academic literature posits that a steep increase in average grades might cause a long-term depreciation of the quality of higher education. This article is, therefore, focused on various factors connected with grade inflation in higher education. The authors highlighted problems associated with teaching evaluation imperfections, academic norm transformation and workload intensity.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the evidence on whether grade inflation has led to an increasing emphasis on standardized test scores as a criterion for law school admissions.

Fit probabilistic models to admissions data for American law schools during the mid to late 1990s, a period during which trends of grade inflation can be observed, and detect changes in emphasis on grades and standardized test scores as admissions criteria over time.

The juxtaposing trends of grade inflation and of the increasing predominance of standardized test scores in law school admissions suggest the possibility that grade inflation has had a negative impact on the value of grades as a signal of student ability.

The empirical evidence of potential undesirable consequences of grade inflation may persuade education professionals to take active measures to control the inflationary trend.

Viewing grades as a signal of a student's ability, this study is the first attempt to measure the responses of signal receivers to grade inflation using real‐world, behavioral data.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how universities play an institutional role in inflating student grade point averages (GPA) by modifying academic polices such as course withdraw, repeats, and satisfactory/unsatisfactory grade options.

Three research strategies are employed: an examination of eight public institutions in a southern state illustrates the variability in academic policies; a transcript analysis demonstrates how students at some universities can capitalize on academic regulations to inflate GPA; and an empirical analysis of 1,798 graduating seniors at one institution explores the parameters of utilizing “do‐over” policies and how the policies correlate with GPA inflation.

Schools are transforming the “rules” of the academic game. Such changes enable students to selectively inflate their GPA, thereby rendering effective comparison of GPA problematic. This is of particular significance to administrators, governing and accrediting bodies, potential employers, graduate or professional school recruiters, and policy makers.

This study is cross‐sectional and the sample is restricted to one state and in some analyses one institution. Longitudinal research exploring a larger number of universities in a variety of states is necessary to uncover the determinants of any changes in academic policies.

The paper reframes grade inflation as GPA inflation, which is partially a function of institutionalized processes, and offers a remedy to the problem of GPA comparison. A new simple metric (EAR) is offered to accompany GPA; only when considering earned hours versus attempted hours (EAR) does grade point regain some utility to educators, recruiters, or policy makers engaged in assessment.

This paper aims to study students' strategic behaviors for increasing their job prospect in response to university administrators' moves for lifting up institutional reputation in the academia.

A Stackelberg differential game is used to study this strategic interplay between administrators and students. In this game, an administrator maximizes institutional quality to build university reputation while student maximizes grades to increase their job prospects. Therefore, administrators being the leader move first while students set strategies for maximizing their objective function by following administrators' move.

The study produces several distinctive results by analyzing administrator–students’ strategic interactions. First, university administrators need to be sufficiently more impatient for building reputation by improving institutional quality than students’ impatience for increasing their job prospects to have feasible solutions. Second, students attempt to increase academic grades for making them more marketable in response to administrators’ additional efforts for increasing their students’ job prospects. Third, exogenous increase in university reputation improves institutional quality and students’ job prospects without affecting their academic grades. However, increase in job prospects motivates students to increase their grades. Fourth, administrators’ too much impatience for increasing university reputation could inflate students’ grade, reduce job prospect and degrade institutional quality. Fifth, an exogenous rise in students’ impatience improves institutional quality and students’ job prospects but reduces students’ grades. Finally, the exogenous increase in opportunity cost of securing good grade degrades institutional quality, thus reducing further job prospects. Therefore, administrators’ positive but moderate impatience for reputation will improve students’ academic performances, institutional quality and job prospects.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to analyze students’ strategic responses for improving their job prospects in response to administrators’ actions for enhancing university reputation. It helps administrators to design an effective framework for building university reputation in the academic market through improving institutional quality and expanding job markets for their students.

Most business schools use student evaluation of teaching (SET) survey data for promotion, tenure, and merit decision‐making purposes. Since most SET questionnaires focus on students’ perceptions of an instructor rather than learning, there may be an incentive for instructors to resort to dysfunctional behavior in order to manipulate SET scores. The purpose of this article is to report the results of a survey designed to determine if such behavior occurs from an administrative viewpoint. A total of 773 administrative accounting professors were surveyed, with a response rate of 45.3 per cent. Although most administrators believe that a single numerical measure cannot capture all relevant evaluative data, they do believe that SET has caused grade inflation and they are dissatisfied with their current SET system. However, the majority of administrators would not replace the current evaluation system with an alternative evaluation system.

The lessons of quality management apply to services as well as tangible goods. Awareness also has been increasing that services, like tangible goods, can be guaranteed as a means of implementing a total quality management (TQM) orientation in the organization. While higher education has been exploring some of the tenents of TQM, it has been slow to embrace the power of service guarantees. In this conceptual article we present a system of service guarantees designed to foster a TQM orientation in higher education. We propose that institutions consider a system of guarantees aimed at three primary constituent groups – students, faculty, and employers – over the short, medium and long term. The rationale and implications of the guarantee system are explored, and possible impediments are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to measure individual intellectual capital (IC) of academic staff as well as to test its impact on the employability readiness of future graduates and the reduction of the discrepancy between competencies developed and grades obtained with the help of two indicators, i.e. intellectual capital indicator (ICI) and employability readiness indicator (ERI). While ICI measures the level of a teacher’s competencies to be transmitted in the education process, ERI measures the level of a student’s competencies developed after completing relevant courses.

This is an empirical research carried out in the form of a case study. Regression model is applied to find the influence of ICI on ERI. The minimisation problem is set with relevant constraints to decrease the discrepancy between ERI and traditional grade point average (GPA).

The data were collected at one Kazakh university and from experts from academia and industry by means of documentary analysis, specialised tests and structured interviews. The direct impact of ICI on ERI is confirmed and the optimal level of ICI that permits an effective decrease in the discrepancy between ERI and GPA is identified.

A longitudinal study covering more programmes is necessary to draw conclusions concerning causality. The application of ICI as a university’s management tool is shown.

The novelty of this study lies in providing a consistent and simple approach for calculating a teacher’s IC and its impact on a student’s employability readiness.

The present field research aimed to assess whether gender differences exist in academic entitlement among college students of a society in rapid transition from a patriarchal system to one fostering gender equity. It then aimed to determine whether particular dimensions of academic entitlement or a simplified one-factor measure can be used as an early indicator of course-related academic difficulties.

College students completed a questionnaire about academic entitlement. Records of test and assessment performance, as well as attendance, were collected for the first half of an academic semester. Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, instruction was delivered online synchronously.

A few gender differences were found that departed from the largely consistent finding in the extant literature of greater academic entitlement in males. For female students, selected dimensions of academic entitlement, but not class attendance, weakly predicted poor performance. For male students, dimensions of academic entitlement were ineffective predictors of both performance and attendance, thereby suggesting that demographic characteristics may define the sensitivity of academic entitlement measures to early, course-related academic difficulties.

The current study has limitations to be addressed in future research. For instance, the insensitivity of male students' academic entitlement to early performance measures needs to be investigated further. It may be the byproduct of the weakening of the view of male superiority typical of patriarchal societies, which arises from top-down interventions intended to promote gender equity. Yet, it may also underline males' reluctance to express a view that is counter to institutional messages of gender equity as well as religious and cultural values of modesty (Al-Absi, 2018), and personal responsibility (Asrorovna, 2020; Smither and Khorsandi, 2009). Another limitation is the extent to which specific items or dimensions of academic entitlement map into specific cultural dimensions, such as individualism and collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity and femininity (Hofstede, 2011).

Academic entitlement is of concern to educators at universities and colleges across the world for several reasons. High levels of stress (Barton and Hirsch, 2016) and frustration (Anderson et al., 2013) usually accompany academic entitlement along with students' self-reports of lower exerted effort (Kopp et al., 2011). In self-reports, academic entitlement is found to be correlated with an external locus of control, lower academic motivation and lower ratings of class attendance (Fromuth et al., 2019). Boswell (2012) has also reported it as linked to lower students' confidence in their ability to complete with success the courses in which they are enrolled (i.e. course self-efficacy). Thus, the availability of early measures of academic risk in core courses, which prepare students for advanced courses in their major, can be particularly valuable to educators and administrators.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) represents a society in rapid transition (Nowak and Vallacher, 2019) from a gender-segregated system to one in which gender equity in educational as well as occupational opportunities and choices is promoted and sustained through top-down institutional changes (e.g. decrees, declarations, investments, etc.; Mansyuroh, 2019). The study’s findings suggest that college students, the main targets of institutional efforts promoting gender equity, may be responsive to such efforts.

The present study is a snapshot of a moment at which the impact of top-down institutional actions for gender equity has become palpable mostly due to its spreading across the large youth population of KSA (Assaad and Roudi-Fahimi, 2007). In this research, the authors asked how the target recipients (i.e. college students) of institutional gender-equity efforts might react.

The purpose of this exploratory study is an examination of some perceptions of US education, as experienced by foreign MBA students.

A longitudinal field study captured perceptions of a group of 51 international students over a one-year interval. The first anticipatory survey was done in India, and the follow-up was made in the USA at the end of a foreign sojourn semester. Inter-item correlations and t-tests were used to examine variance in student perceptions, highlighted by qualitative elements.

In general, the students went home, less impressed than they had expected to be in terms of the perceived general quality of the American business education, as well as their abilities to make friends with the local people. Additionally, the observed preparation of the American students for master’s studies was not nearly as high as the foreign students had anticipated.

Results are not generalizable to broad populations, as the sample was small and localized.

Emerging markets are successfully luring locals and sojourners based on cost and proximity as they achieve greater legitimacy in their institutional credentials. This could challenge the preeminence of Western higher education, especially in light of concerns arising from marketization and rigor. Meanwhile, developed market institutions need to be strategically mindful of their international guests as a resource rather than a commodity.

Extant internationalization studies tend to focus on administrative viewpoints, whereas this research examines the perspective of international students, which may be indicative of lessening gaps between perceptions of quality of developed and emerging market higher education.