Abstract:

Whereas grade inflation in university diplomas are a well-discussed topic in Germany - e.g. published the official institution ‘Wissenschaftsrat’ regularly reports in this field – remains the question of inflation in school grading practically undiscussed. The difference is explained by the fact that there is an official statistic about university grades but no such one exists about school grades.

However, higher education research provides interesting data on high-school grades by answers to questionnaires of students. And since the ratio of university students to high-school graduates does not change so much and remains quite high, one may take the information from such questionnaires as a good indicator for all high-school grades. In our proposed talk we mainly use a dataset of a recurrent questionnaire used in many waves with a total of more than 80.000 entries. The ‘Konstanzer Studierendensurvey’ provides information about high-school grades of German students from 1971-2008. And up to now it has never be used to discuss high-school grading trend since school researchers are unaware of this information.

In addition we look at other data, more recent material from the conference of educational ministers (KMK) and from answers to questionnaires from high-school alumnae, collected by the DZHW. Basically the outcome is pretty much the same: It shows a significant improvement of grades over time.

We then discuss if changes in the student composition explains the outcome (e.g. more female students, more overcrowding, difference in the grading policy of some states etc.) We will reject all those explanations. We finally offer possible explanations and discuss how the expectations of high-school graduates may contribute to the grade inflation in the university system.

The paper is an outcome of a research project about grade inflation at German universities, financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG).

Keywords:

Grade inflation, High-school, Germany.