Making the Grade
On grade inflation.
One topic that has recently caught fire in education policy circles is a perennial one: grade inflation. We tend not to think of grade inflation because we can’t really see evidence of it in our daily lives. Sure, we see evidence of declining standards all around—just look at the horrendous quality of service that prevails in so many retail establishments these days. But we don’t necessarily connect those declining standards to education. When we do realize the connection, we get upset that grade inflation has gotten so bad lately, and we spend a few weeks discussing the causes and realizing that there isn’t really a good solution, and then we forget about the whole thing and move on.
Grades are important. They are a massive part of the way we do school, both in K–12 and higher education. We take them for granted because they have always been part of how we do things, part of the “grammar of schooling,” as one group of education scholars memorably called it. And yet, we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking or talking about them. We choose to think and talk and write and debate about other issues, like school choice and gender politics and teacher-to-student ratios—important issues, to be sure, but ones that have little to do with the actual practice of education. The whole time we aren’t thinking about grades, they continue to shape the way we do school, and the grades inevitably inflate (whoever heard of grade deflation?), until some enterprising reporter or essayist or college committee investigates the problem and reminds us all that grade inflation is here to stay, and there’s nothing we can do about it, and yet we should do something—anything—about it.
In this essay, I want to attempt to explain why grade inflation happens and explore some potential solutions.
What are grades?
In theory, this is an easy question to answer. Grades are the scores given to students based on the students’ mastery of a given subject. They are often represented alphanumerically, meaning they are presented to students as both a letter and a number (A+ for 100, C for 75, etc.). At root, grades are an attempt to objectively assess a student based on what he knows.
But it quickly gets tricky. It’s easy enough to note that grades in, say, math class represent a student’s ability to do the math problem on which he is assessed. A teacher goes over the material; the student studies his notes; the student takes the test; the teacher assigns the grade based on whether he accurately applied his knowledge to the test. The more correct his knowledge, the better his grade. It’s harder, however, to apply this same formula to a more subjective topic like, say, English. We can go through the same motions—the teacher teaches, etc.—but we lose the nuance of English as a subject. The quality of the output, especially if it’s an essay or a test with open-ended questions, is not as clear-cut as is the output of the math problems. As a result, the grades in those subjects are harder to make concrete. They are much more subject to the whims or the expertise of the teacher.
Even when grades are more objective, they can be distorted by teachers. The most obvious example of this is when teachers scale the results of a test. A common way of scaling a test is converting the highest-scoring grade to a 100 and then adding points to all other students’ grades based on the spread between the top scorer’s original grade and 100. For instance, a student who scored a 90 would get bumped up to 100; because that student gained 10 points, 10 points would get added to every other student’s grade, so the student who got a 75 would get bumped to an 85. Teachers and professors scale tests when they are noticeably more difficult than other tests, especially in subjects that are more math-intensive.
Additionally, several non-academic factors affect a student’s grades. A teacher’s relationship with her student, especially at the K–12 level (where classes are typically smaller than college lectures and teachers know their students better), can sway the grade she gives him. The teacher might like a student more than she likes others and, consciously or not, give him more lenient grades, regardless of the quality of his output. Similarly, teachers can often be bullied by angry parents into increasing a student’s grades. This scenario is especially likely when a student has historically earned high grades. The parent has gotten used to the student doing well in school, and therefore assumes that if the student starts to do worse, it must be the fault of the teacher. (It’s also more likely when the parent is engaged in the child’s schooling.) Participation and attendance (particularly in the younger grades) can also influence a student’s grade—hence the phrase “A for effort.” This can occasionally result in a strange situation in which a student who performs well on the test but doesn’t participate does worse in the class, overall, than his peer who does poorly on the test but raises his hand more often.
I would guess that most people find this scenario to be unfair to the kid who does well on the test, especially when we consider that the grade a student receives is supposed to represent his mastery of the subject, not his behavior in class. This problem can be solved, or at least lessened, by weighting the test more heavily than the participation. But it is still a complication that should be considered.
Not everyone views the consideration of non-mastery factors in grades to be a problem. People who make this argument say that school is not simply about learning content—it is also about learning skills and attitudes that will help them succeed in adulthood. Therefore, it is necessary to grade students on things like participation and homework completion, because if students are not graded on those things, then they will not learn to value them and will be set up for failure later in life.
Therefore we should recognize that, at least in the early years, the ideal version of grading is often discarded at the classroom door.
What do grades mean?
Again, in theory, grades simply represent how much a student has learned from a class—the higher the grade, the more he learned. But as mentioned above, grades are often influenced by non-academic factors. This means grades work differently in practice than they do in theory. This disconnect between theory and practice has real-world consequences for the meaning of grades. If we think grades represent a student’s content mastery, then we assume that a student with a high grade in a particular subject knows a lot about that subject. But if the student’s grade is artificially high because it takes into account non-academic factors such as behavior or participation, then the grade is less meaningful.
One consequence of this disconnect is that parents, especially at the K–12 level, don’t really know how their kids are performing just by looking at the grades they earn. Students get report cards at the end of each quarter and progress reports halfway through each quarter. Parents, therefore, have eight opportunities to learn how their kids are doing in school. (This picture is out of date: With today’s grading systems, which are updated instantaneously and sent to parents through push notifications, parents have infinite opportunities to learn how their kids are doing.) Each time one of these reports lands on the kitchen table, a parent can assess their child’s grades and work to improve the lower ones.
But if students’ grades are artificially high due to non-academic factors, then parents are being misled by their children’s grades. A high grade in any given class doesn’t necessarily mean the student is performing well on the content in that class.
Parents don’t always know that subject-matter mastery is only part of the grade. Or if they do, they don’t necessarily know how much of the grade is based on non-academic factors. They assume that if their child is doing well in a class, he knows a good deal of the content in that class. These mismatched expectations can mean parents are in for a rude surprise when they learn of their child’s performance on the end-of-year state assessment. These assessments are much more objective than the grades students earn in school. There is no behavior or participation component on state assessments—there is simply the assessment. And so, they provide more accurate information about how the student is doing on the subject being tested. A student who does well on non-academic factors and earns high grades might score poorly on the state assessment. The grades he earned, which were supposed to reveal how well he knew the material, did not provide accurate information to him or his parents.
A related phenomenon occurs when students do well in school but not so well on the SAT or other standardized test. Of course, this can happen even when students do well on the subject-matter tests they take in school. In other words, it’s not just a matter of students doing incredibly well on factors like participation and attendance but worse on tests. Rather, it’s a sign that the content being taught in schools is too easy, leaving the student unprepared for the standardized test. (I should note that the SAT is not the same sort of test as a state end-of-year assessment. The SAT is more like an IQ test, in that it attempts to measure a student’s innate ability rather than his academic preparedness. Still, it’s a helpful illustration.)
How did grades become so important?
Here I start to tell a speculative story. I think it’s right, or at least it’s very close to being right. But I should caution the reader that this story is based not on data but on my understanding of the social forces at play in the grading system.
Grades are very important to students, especially the ones who do well in school. Good students obsess over their grades. They pay attention in class, complete their homework, behave in school, and study for the test. If they do poorly on the test, they ask if they can retake it; if they are not allowed to retake the test, they ask for help preparing for the next one.
High performers have become more obsessed with grades over time. This obsession likely grew in the mid- to late-20th century, when elite colleges became more interested in how a student performed in academics than whether their family had donated to the school. Another factor is surely economics: This period saw a shift away from manufacturing and farming and toward service-sector jobs. These jobs often required college degrees. As a result, children were encouraged to go to college. They knew that they could only get into college if they did well in school. And doing well in school meant getting higher grades.
Getting good grades suddenly became much more important than it had ever been. Relatedly, the penalty for getting bad grades became much higher. Before, students who didn’t get good grades could always land a job on a farm or in a factory. Now they had fewer opportunities open to them. Parents also became involved. They encouraged their kids to do well in school so they could go to a good college. As the cultural and economic grap between blue-collar and white-collar jobs grew, parents realized the returns to going to college—and thus getting good grades in K–12—were enormous.
When students eventually made it to college, they found the rat race did not subside. Especially if they got into highly competitive schools, they realized that they had to work harder in order to distinguish themselves from their peers. They started to put intense emotional weight into getting good grades, leading to freakouts when they didn’t earn grades they thought they deserved. These responses often drove them to push their professors for higher grades. Professors, as with K–12 teachers, thought that keeping their grading standards strict wasn’t worth the headache.
These factors were compounded by electronic grading systems that show students how they are doing in real time—a radical departure from previous eras, in which students could only guess at their end-of-term grade until they received it in the mail. Today’s students are constantly checking their grades, simply because they can.
All of these pressures served to drive up grades.
Grade inflation and grade compression
Grade inflation happens when the number of higher grades continually increases. It is a natural consequences of the forces I described above. Grade inflation has been a known problem, especially in higher education, for several decades. The recently retired Harvard political philosophy professor Harvey C. Mansfield, long known for being a tough grader (he was nicknamed “Harvey C-Minus Mansfield), started giving students two grades—one to reflect what he thought they should have earned and another official one reflecting what he thought they would have earned under Harvard’s inflated grades.
A related phenomenon is grade compression: As students are awarded higher grades, it becomes harder to distinguish between them. Grade compression is usually a result of grade inflation. (I suppose grade compression could also happen in a scenario of rapid grade deflation, in which more and more students are given Fs and Ds rather than As and Bs. But this seems very unlikely.) But another factor also leads to grade compression: the grade ceiling. The highest grade that can be awarded, barring extra credit, is a 100, which gets converted to an A. In most schools, any grade above a 93 is also an A. Hence the grade compression: At least when it comes to GPA, there is nowhere for a student to climb after he hits an A.
Consequences of grade inflation
Grade inflation distorts the meaning of grades. Remember: We started by saying that grades are supposed to represent a student’s mastery of any given subject. But when grades are inflated, they no longer obviously mean a student has mastered a given subject. Some of the students who get 4.0 GPAs in college were truly excellent students. But many of them weren’t. Similarly, some of the students who do well in K–12 schools would have earned high grades during a time of comparatively low grade inflation. But many of them would have been middling students, averaging C or B-minus grades because they didn’t perform well enough to get As.
This distortion of meaning matters in the job market. When an employer is hiring new college graduates, she often looks at applicants’ college GPAs to see how they did in school. She does this because she thinks grades matter, that they tell her something about the applicant’s ability to do work. But with grade inflation, GPA matters less to a prospective employer. This is because grade inflation blurs the differences between different applicants. When there is grade inflation, an employer can no longer look to GPA to glean any meaningful information, since all applicants’ grades are high.
Interestingly, abnormally low GPAs actually tell the employer more during a time of grade inflation than they do when there is no grade inflation. This is because the employer expects every applicant to have a similar GPA. Any deviation from that norm, therefore, is noticeable. And since the typical GPA is close to 4.0 (the highest possible GPA in colleges that don’t award a grade higher than an A), any deviation from the norm is going to be noticeably lower than the average. The employer who sees a resume with a lower-than-average GPA is likely to think the student must have been particularly bad in school (because everyone else did well), and is therefore likely to pass on hiring that candidate.
Solving grade inflation
One potential solution to the grade-inflation problem is to create a higher grade (and GPA) to which students can aspire. At first glance, this “solution” seems more likely to worsen the problem. After all, if the problem with grade inflation is an increasingly high average GPA, then adding even higher grades to the distribution would seem to accelerate that issue.
But recall that grade inflation is only part of the problem. The other part is grade compression. As grades continue to increase, they bump up against the A ceiling. It’s not that an increasing number of students are getting high grades—it’s that an increasing number of students are getting A grades. If you start giving students A-plus grades, you raise the ceiling.
I like this solution because it is simple, but it may be too blunt. In order for it to work, you need to be willing to award an A-plus only to students who truly deserve to be recognized for their outstanding performance. This solution does nothing to address the cultural factors that led to grade inflation (and compression) in the first place. Therefore, the same students who were clamoring for the A grades will start clamoring for the A-plus grades. Once teachers and professors cave to these demands, the problem will be back to where we started, leading to an A-plus-plus or some other, higher grade. In other words, increasing the grade ceiling can temporarily solve the grade compression problem, but grade inflation continues unabated.
Another solution is to create a quota system, in which teachers can only give a certain number of A grades. This seems to be the most obvious solution. It attempts to restore the true meaning of grades by restricting the number of students who are distinguished by their professors as the top performers in the class. And it would, at least in theory, create a wider spread in the GPAs of students, reducing the distortion effect. Employers would then be able to distinguish between the good and the bad students, since only a few of them would have very high GPAs.
But this idea has its own drawbacks. For one thing, it might not solve the grade compression problem. Yes, fewer students would end up with 4.0 GPAs. But unless the quota system also mandates that only a certain number of students get A-minuses or B-pluses, it doesn’t necessarily solve for grade compression. Professors might simply give most students the next-highest-allowable grade once they hit the cap on A grades. The compression would just move down the grade distribution slightly. More important is that this solution would require fortitude on the part of school leaders. Students and parents would object to any school imposing a quota system. Many of them would complain to school administrators. School administrators might decide they don’t want to continue fighting the quota battle. As a result, they might repeal the policy after only a year or two. And then we’d be right back to the beginning.
A third idea is for colleges to require applicants to submit standardized tests such as the SAT or ACT and to broadcast their average admitted student’s score. This is the most blunt of the three solutions I’ve presented so far. It’s also the most realistic. Several colleges already do both of these things. This idea would not solve grade inflation at either the college or K–12 level. But it would help employers distinguish between applicants based on what college they went to. There is some value to such a solution, but it is obviously more of a bandaid than a true attempt at solving the problem.
Conclusion
Ultimately, grade inflation is unlikely to be solved anytime soon. It is a society-wide problem that has a lot to do with cultural and economic factors—factors that school administrators are hopeless to solve.
A final note: Perhaps the key to addressing grade inflation is to return to the original purpose—to demonstrate how well students know the subject they are being graded on. To the greatest extent possible, get rid of the non-academic factors that influence grades today. Assess students only on what they know. Give them opportunities before the final assessment to test their understanding and diagnose where they went wrong, but grade students only on what they have demonstrated they know. Make grades automatic and unchallengeable. Where possible, put grades in the hands of administrators, not teachers.
Such a change may be too radical. But if grades are to mean anything, radical change may be required.