New teachers may expect students to work as hard as they themselves did as undergraduates. These new instructors all too soon discover that their students find the workload excessive and the grading standards unreasonable. The low ratings that are likely to result can be quite discouraging. Students may avoid math and science courses . University-level math and science courses have the reputation of being ones in which even good students can get low grades.
Higher education becomes education lite .
When instructors are discouraged from teaching challenging courses and students gravitate toward less demanding, high-grading courses, there will necessarily be a reduction both of the number of demanding courses available and of the enrollments of such courses that survive. These trends can be described as a 'dumbing down' of higher education or as the evolution of higher education 'lite'. Grades creep up . Although grade inflation appears to go hand in hand with the lite-ening of higher education, grade inflation may not itself be a cause for concern. If gradually increasing grades went together with gradually increasing educational content, the upward movement of grades might be taken as a positive sign.