Seo Beom-soo 'The result of leaving the grading evaluation to the university's discretion... ‘Ministry of Education needs to prepare guidelines’

It was found that more than half of graduates from four-year universities nationwide graduated with a grade of 90 or higher, which is equivalent to an A grade.

While the number of graduates with the highest grades has nearly doubled in the past five years, those with poor grades below 70 have virtually disappeared, raising concerns that a response is needed as the phenomenon of grade inflation in college is worsening.

According to the 'Distribution of graduation scores for four-year college graduates over the past five years' submitted by the Ministry of Education on the 6th, People Power Party lawmaker Seo Beom-soo (Ulju-gun, Ulsan), a member of the National Assembly Education Committee, showed that the average percentage score of four-year college graduates nationwide rose for five consecutive years from 88.19 in 2021 to 89.45 in 2025. This count was conducted on approximately 1.57 million graduates of 200 four-year universities across the country based on university information announcements.

As a result of the analysis, the proportion of graduates with a score of 90 or higher increased from 44.0% in 2021 to 53.4% ​​in 2025, exceeding the majority starting in 2023.

In particular, the percentage of top graduates with a score of 95 or higher increased 1.8 times from 9.9% to 18.1%. On the other hand, the percentage of graduates with a score of less than 70 was only 0.2%.

The grade inflation phenomenon appeared more steeply at major top universities. When adding up graduates from 10 universities, including Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Korea University, Sogang University, Sungkyunkwan University, Hanyang University, Chung-Ang University, Kyung Hee University, University of Seoul, and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, the average percentage score rose from 90.13 points in 2021 to 92.11 points in 2025.

The percentage of scores above 90 points doubled from 59.5% to 72.3%, and the percentage of points above 95 points doubled from 16.9% to 34.7% in five years. This is a larger increase than the national average increase (9.9% → 18.1% for scores of 95 or higher).

The gap in grades between regions and universities also became clear. While 67.0% of graduates from universities in Seoul received a score of 90 or higher, universities in Gyeongbuk (39.8%) and Jeonnam and Gwangju (42.2%) did not reach this level, showing that even with the same score, the difference in relative position increased depending on the university.

Rep. Seo said, “As a result of leaving grade evaluation to the discretion of universities, grade inflation spread across the country and the distinctiveness of transcripts was lost,” and added, “The Ministry of Education must establish grade evaluation guidelines and strengthen the announcement of grade distribution by university to establish objective evaluation standards.”