The Construction and Analysis of Course Grades Across Public Universities

University course grades are quite important and are used for evaluation of student performance, gauging course difficulty and student preparedness, assessing instructor effectiveness, student motivation, and graduate school admissions. However, numerous concerns about grading are often raised by education researchers and practitioners regarding grade inflation and the inconsistent application of grading policies across instructors, academic departments, and universities. Research in grade analysis has been limited due to the lack of publicly accessible high quality, recent, datasets that cover multiple institutions. Without such datasets it is impossible to accurately characterize and analyze general grading trends and issues. As part of this study, grades from 33 public U.S. colleges and universities were collected, organized, merged into a common format, and posted in a publicly available repository. The dataset and associated information are described in detail in this paper. In addition, analyses of the grading data were performed at the institutional, academic major, departmental, and instructor level, with several interesting and notable results, such as academic departments assigning very different grades, and this trend being relatively consistent across institutions. The dataset described in this paper can serve as a resource for educational researchers interested in grading and can be used to develop, evaluate, and test hypotheses related to grading and grading policies.