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Dr. Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley’s Centre for Studies in Higher Education, in his just-published eight years of course syllabi and grades at a research-intensive university in Texas titled, “Artificial Intelligence and Grade Inflation,” found that courses that were more exposed to AI assistance (meaning they had a larger share of tasks in which AI assistance is stronger) saw a marked increase in higher grades after the advent of ChatGPT in 2022.
According to him, after ChatGPT became available, the percentage of students receiving A grades in AI-exposed courses increased by about 30 percent relative to their pre-ChatGPT level, compared with courses with limited AI exposure.
Chirikov isolated AI-caused grade inflation from improved student performance resulting from AI tutoring and “sorting” – stronger students choosing courses that are easier to complete with AI assistance – “by looking at how grades change in courses where homework plays a major role”, he explained.
By way of example, Chirkov said, “Imagine you have two kinds of intensive writing courses which are exposed to AI assistance. There’s one in which homework is 10% of the grade and another where it is 40%. 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.” AI and Grade Inflation’s” data was constructed from 319 courses taught in the fall semester in 84 departments between 2018 and 2025, which represent more than 500,000 student course enrolments.
The 84 departments represent nine disciplinary fields. The largest are business (21%), social sciences (20%), engineering (15%), humanities (14%) and math-computer science (13%). The average number of students in each course was 199.
Chirkov undertook this study for a number of reasons. First, as “AI and Grade Inflation’s” literature review shows, grade inflation has been a growing concern, with a 2025 study by Professor Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard University’s dean of undergraduate education, reporting that between 2005 and 2025, the share of A grades being awarded at Harvard College increased from 24% to 60.2%.
Secondly, “prior research has mostly looked at grade inflation as a problem of grading standards, that is, whether instructors, departments or institutions are becoming more lenient in how they evaluate student work,” Chirkov says.
Some results
The increase in grades following the introduction of ChatGPT was concentrated at the top of the grade distribution. The average share of A grades rose from 44% in 2022 to 48% in 2025. Over the same time period, the share of C grades fell from about 8% to 7% and D/F grades fell from 3% to 2%.
According to Chirkov, in the causal analysis, the effect of AI exposure was largest for A grades: the share of students receiving an A increased by 13 percentage points in more AI-exposed courses. The effects became smaller further down the grade distribution scale – nine percentage points for at least A- and five percentage points for at least B+ – and even smaller below that.
