The Other Inflation: Inflated grades and lowered standards, often in the name of “equity,” are destroying educational excellence from kindergarten through college – By Wai Wah Chin (City Journal) / June 23, 2022
People these days worry about the rising prices of gasoline and milk, but there’s another destructive inflation that has gone unchecked for years: grade inflation. Just like monetary inflation, which makes your bank account look great until you’re rudely awakened by the reality that you can’t buy as much as you used to, grade inflation makes your transcript look great, until you discover that you haven’t learned as much as you thought. And though grade inflation is not new, its recent intersection with “equity” bodes ill for the integrity of our schools.
It’s hard to deny the reality of grade inflation at America’s colleges. As Times Higher Education reported in 2016, “A is by far the most common grade on both four-year and two-year college campuses (more than 42 per cent of grades). At four-year schools, awarding of As has been going up five to six percentage points per decade and As are now three times more common than they were in 1960.” Three years later, Forbes reported that “in the early 1960s, 15 percent of all college grades nationwide were A’s. Today, that number has tripled—45 percent of all grades are A’s. The most common grade awarded in college nationwide is an A.” As a sign of how deeply entrenched grade inflation has become, note that two prestigious institutions—Princeton University and Wellesley College—that put the brakes on grade inflation in 2004 have since been forced to rescind their efforts (Princeton in 2014, and Wellesley in 2019). No other universities had followed their lead, and they did not want to continue bearing the brunt of student complaints.
The precollege situation is arguably worse. A recently published ACT analysis of 4 million high school seniors shows steadily rising grade-point averages for students who took the ACT between 2010 and 2021, with the number of A-minus students surpassing the number of B-minus students in 2016. This did not happen because students who took the ACT became academically stronger; over the same time period, students’ ACT and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores stagnated or fell. An earlier study by the College Board shows a similar pattern of rising grade-point averages and stagnant SAT scores between 1996 and 2006. The study also compared Advanced Placement (AP) class grades assigned by the students’ teachers against scores in the anonymously graded AP exams. Not surprisingly, AP class grades rose steadily while AP exam scores stayed stagnant.
CONTINUE > https://www.city-journal.org/grade-inflation-equity-and-educational-integrity
