A sweeping new study from UC Berkeley is raising fresh concerns about what artificial intelligence is doing to the integrity of college grades, finding that the share of A grades surged dramatically after ChatGPT’s release in courses most exposed to AI.
The researcher Igor Chirikov analyzed more than 500,000 grades at a large research university spanning 2018 to 2025, using a difference-in-differences design to isolate the impact of AI on grade distributions across courses with varying levels of AI exposure.
In courses with more AI-exposed tasks, such as writing and coding, Chirikov says the share of A grades rose by 13 percentage points after ChatGPT’s release, approximately 30% relative to the 2022 baseline.
The distributional pattern of the grade inflation reveals that AI is primarily converting A- and B+ grades into A grades, rather than lifting struggling students.
“After ChatGPT’s release, the share of students receiving an A increased substantially in high-exposure courses. The pooled estimate for the share of students receiving an A is 13 percentage points, or approximately 30% relative to the 2022 baseline mean of 0.44. The effect becomes smaller and less significant further down the distribution — 9 percentage points for at least A-, 5 percentage points for at least B+, and small and insignificant below that.”
He also finds that the gains were witnessed more in courses that had heavy homework weighting.
“These increases were larger where homework carried greater weight, consistent with AI substituting for student work rather than broad learning gains from AI.”
Chirikov says the implications for how grades function as signals of student capability are direct and serious.
“When AI improves submitted work on assessed tasks without corresponding skill growth, grades become less informative measures of student capability.”
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