Research corroborates this. According to Christopher Healy, an associate professor of computer science at Furman University who compiles grade distributions, about 75 percent of grades in master’s programs are A’s, 22 percent are B’s and 3 percent are C’s. Less than 1 percent are D’s or F’s.

“At the graduate level, the percentages of C, D, F grades has always been low,” he says. “The big change has been the boundary between A and B grades. A’s have gone up from about 50 percent 40-plus years ago.” In 2008 at the University of Utah, for example, 73 percent of grades were A’s, compared with 45 percent in 1965.

Certainly, C’s, D’s and F’s are more common among undergraduates. Educators say that the grad-school grade distribution is due in part to the fact that graduate students are older adults (average age: 32) who want to be there. But it’s also a result of escalating grade inflation and the practice of passing even students with lackluster performance.

Schools, of course, are businesses, and master’s programs lucrative, so keeping customers is essential. At the N.Y.U. graduate film school, tuition hovers around $50,000 annually for the three-year program. “There’s pressure to retain students,” Mr. Santana says. “Once the class is formed in the beginning of an academic year, that class is formed for the next three years. You can’t enter the program midstream. So if you lost any amount of students, you’re losing $150,000 for three years.”

Rachel Louise Snyder, an assistant professor of literature in American University’s M.F.A. program, which is pass/fail, believes the economic downturn may have intensified fear among faculty members of the consequences of failing students. “No one has ever come up to me and said explicitly, ‘You must pass these students,’ ” she says. “But the expectation is that they’re adults, they’re paying money, and as long as they’re doing minimal work, they should pass. My guess is that probably most grad schools do that.”

To that end, schools go out of their way to help floundering students succeed. That includes giving extra credit options, or letting the student take an incomplete and make up the class at a later time. Rather than let students fail, many schools will suggest a leave of absence. Or “counsel them out.”