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.
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