Grade Inflation Corrupts America’s Schools and Cripples Her Children
The United States education system is corrupted from top to bottom.
That is a strong statement but one that is quite easy to defend. The evidence is all around. This article will focus on one aspect of that corruption: grade inflation.
Indeed, the present system of awarding grades is disintegrating. In a pure system, high grades would reflect both the teacher’s and the student’s abilities. Only a superior student with a skilled teacher to act as a guide can truly perform superior academic work.
However, such combinations are scarce. Yet, the demand for exemplary grades from students, parents, universities and employers is limitless.
Grade inflation is the tendency to plug that gap by awarding grades that rise over time. As such, its primary beneficiaries are those with an itch to succeed. However, ambition does not equal diligence or ability. Today, many minimally competent students receive the highest grades possible.
No matter how carefully designed, any grading system is arbitrary. To be useful, it must make shining demarcations that everyone understands. Unfortunately, there are often minuscule differences between individual students whose grades end up being very different. Many grading scales designate 60% as the lowest passing grade. In reality, though, the actual difference between a 61% paper and one worthy of only 59% is tiny. Yet, one student passes, and the other fails.
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However, the difference between passing and failing can be massive. This is especially true at the end of the academic year when the school determines which students advance to the next level and which are “held back.” Sympathetic teachers devised a number of ways to “help” narrowly failing students get minimally passing grades.
By its nature, disintegration is a slow process. It began in small, barely noticeable ways. A drop of water from a leaky roof soaks into a beam; a particle of salt makes contact with an unprotected bit of steel. Dealt with effectively at the inception, neither has much effect. Neglected, both undermine the structure to the point of collapse.
Most likely, the kind teachers described above began the process of grade inflation. It was abetted when the spirit of the sixties removed many of society’s natural hierarchies. University education professors questioned the ethics of assigning “value judgments” to students’ work. After all, they argued, grades were only a way of imposing the teachers’ standards on the students. “Democracy” in education demanded that such practices cease. The protégées of such scholars tried to devise more “authentic” methods of evaluating their own students.
As the process accelerated, the quality of student work declined. Some teachers tried to uphold old standards. These intrepid few were criticized, ostracized, and ridiculed by students, parents, colleagues and administrators. Eventually, such objections disappeared because the objecting teachers adapted or the “die-hards” retired.
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The inevitable result was that high school students could no longer do traditional college-level work. The Universities could have reacted by keeping standards high and forcing the high schools to do the same. However, the rot spread relentlessly upward. The universities found it easier to “adapt” themselves to the new situation. By abandoning traditional educational standards of instruction and rigor, they could ensure “seamless transitions” for students matriculating from high school to college.
The simultaneous movement to end the liberal arts traditions of Western Christian civilization played its role as well. The iconoclasts condemned Greek and Latin as “dead languages,” unworthy of a modern college student’s efforts. Ancient and medieval history were no longer “relevant” to life in the “real” world. Practitioners of “Critical Theory” dismissed the need to learn about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. These were, after all, only “dead white men” whose observations held no particular weight compared to those whose ideas dominated courses in “Black Studies,” “Women’s Studies,” “Queer Studies,” etc.
Of course, these new fields of endeavor had no established canons or clearly defined ideas that students needed to explore and master. Lacking any set of standards, the courses became whatever the radical professors teaching them wanted them to be. Grades, they argued, were “artificial constructs” anyway, so the only criterion was agreement with the professor’s newly-birthed dogmas. Lacking any other yardstick, every student who agreed with the professor got an “A.”
Some academics argue that the rot has undermined the structure so much that it cannot be saved. At least that is the view of Dr. Yashcha Mounk, a “Professor of Practice” at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. His recent Wall Street Journal article packed most of its conclusions into the headline-“College Grades Have Become a Charade. It’s Time to Abolish Them.”
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The article begins with a series of sobering statistics. In 1950, Dr. Mounk explained, the average Harvard student carried a 2.6 grade point average (GPA) out of a possible 4.0. The average GPA swelled to 3.4 by 2003 and to 3.8 in 2024. The interpretation is simple. The average Harvard student seventy years ago was at the cusp of a B or C average. That student’s equally intelligent great-grandchild has a solid A average.
Dr. Mounk sees two functions that grading serves. The more important, in his opinion, is to “give students a good sense of how they’re doing.” The other is a “signaling function” that tells “outsiders” (potential employers, etc.) how that student compares with other graduates. The inflated grades now prevalent serve neither purpose. If everyone gets an A, then an A becomes meaningless.
According to the professor, the “cure” could come in one of two ways-to grade on a “curve” in which students are forced to compete against each other for the highest grades, with the progressively less successful getting B’s, C’s, D’s and, perhaps, failing grades. The other possibility is to limit the number of A’s a professor can award to a set percentage of students in any given class.
However, there is little chance that universities will adopt such practices. As Dr. Mounk correctly argues, they work against the interests of administrators who want to attract as many tuition-paying students as possible.
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Professor Mounk’s “solution” is for all colleges to move to a “Pass-Fail’ system for all classes and all students. With all due respect to the professor, this is not a solution but a surrender. Whatever minimal function today’s inflated grades serve will be obliterated. Professors who today give all of their students A’s won’t assign failing grades simply because the nomenclature of grading has changed. Such a change would merely make an unfortunate situation permanent.
Of course, grade inflation is far from the only issue facing America’s education system. It remains to be seen how long the rotted beams will continue to support the massive academic structure built upon them.
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