--- title: "Grade Inflation Is Going Nuts as Every Student Is Basically Submitting the Same Essay" description: "AI is causing more students to get easy A grades, a new study found, causing a crisis among educators and employers." date: "2026-05-18" modified: "2026-05-18" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/grade-inflation-ai" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Education" - "Ethics" - "Future Society" --- # Grade Inflation Is Going Nuts as Every Student Is Basically Submitting the Same Essay ![A smiling child with braided hair holds up a paper showing a large "A+" grade. The image is stylized with a halftone dot effect and a bright red background.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images* Being a straight-A student doesn't mean what it used to. Today, widely available AI chatbots make cheating on your homework and churning out entire essays easier than ever. If students don't outright ask an AI for answers, then they're asking one for tips and inspiration, or to double-check their work. The result, besides a damaged generation of kids [being robbed of their own education]()? Grade inflation. A [new study]() from the University of California, Berkeley found that the percent of A grades in college classes that're "AI exposed," or vulnerable to AI cheating, has shot up by about 30 percent since the release of ChatGPT. The upshot: students are using AI to get better grades, [not better their minds](). "As much as AI is helping people become more productive, to produce more, I think it may harm their learning," Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education and the study's sole author, [told *The Wall Street Journal*](). That also means that from an employer's point of view, a good GPA is less impressive than ever. As a result, employers have raised their minimum GPA requirements, leaving students who actually learn without an AI's help in an utterly unfair position. The percentage of employers on the careers website Handshake that required a minimum GPA of 3.5 jumped to nearly 25 percent this year from 9 percent in 2020, per the *WSJ*. In the study, Chirikov examined the course syllabi and data on more than 500,000 grades from a university in Texas between 2018 and 2025. He then identified which courses were more vulnerable to AI cheating, which were typically in the humanities and engineering. Before 2023, the first full year of ChatGPT's release, both groups trended about the same. From that year onward, though, the A grades in the AI-exposed group spiked by about four percent. Subject matter wasn't the only determinant of what made a course "AI-exposed." The type of assignments given, and how they were weighted, also played a role. "Imagine you have two kinds of intensive writing courses which are exposed to AI assistance. There's one in which homework is 10 percent of the grade and another where it is 40 percent," Chirikov [explained to *University World News*](). "I found that in the course in which homework carries more weight the grade increases were higher." "This pattern points to the main mechanism of grade inflation \[being\] driven by the students submitting AI-assisted work to be graded," he added. Grade inflation predates AI. But traditionally, the perceived culprits have been softening professors and slipping standards. This research squarely puts some of the blame on AI. Educators are still grappling with how to handle AI cheating. There's been a shift away from take-home assignments to placing more emphasis on in-class essays, assignments, and tests. Princeton University will [require exams to be supervised for the first time in over a century](), defying its long-held honor code. Harvard University seems to be more concerned with the inflation itself, and is now considering a proposal to limit A grades to a maximum of 20 percent of the class. Around 60 percent of grades there were an A in the 2024-2025 academic year, which is more than double the percentage in 2006, [*Bloomberg* reported](). **More on AI:** [*Bosses Horrified as "AI Native" College Graduates Hit the Workplace*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()