grade inflation

Grade inflation is the tendency to award progressively higher academic grades for work that would have received lower grades in the past. Higher grades in themselves do not prove grade inflation; Alfie Kohn, US author and lecturer on education, said in 2004 that rising grades don't in itself prove that grade inflation exists. It's necessary to show—and, to the best of my knowledge, it has never been shown—that those higher grades are undeserved.