EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

Grade inflation in high schools

Stock.
and

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/grade-inflation-in-high-schools/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:

Although the vast majority of American parents believe their child is performing at or above grade level, in reality two-thirds of U.S. teenagers are ill-prepared for college when they leave high school.

Why this enormous disconnect? Could it be that test scores signaling that kids are “less than proficient” don’t register with parents because they conflict with the grades on their child’s report card?

Authored by American University’s Seth Gershenson, this study examines how easy or hard it is to get a good grade in high school today and how that’s changed over time. It answers three key questions:

  1. How frequent and large are discrepancies between report-card grades and state test scores? Do they vary by school demographics?
  2. To what extent do high school test scores, course grades, GPAs, and attendance align with student performance on college entrance exams?
  3. How have such alignments and discrepancies changed in recent years?

Utilizing student-level data for all public school students taking Algebra I in North Carolina from 2004–05 through 2015–16 (including course transcripts, state end-of-course exam scores, and ACT scores), the study yielded three key findings:

  1. Although many students get good grades, few earn top marks on the statewide end-of-course exams for those classes.
  2. Algebra I end-of-course exam scores predict math ACT scores much better than do class grades.
  3. During the decade studied, grade inflation was more severe in schools attended by affluent students than in those attended by lower-income pupils.

These alarming findings carry several implications.

Course grades and test scores each have their place. Both grades and test scores provide valuable information because they measure different aspects of student performance and potential.

Yet parents don’t seem to value both equally. When there’s a big difference between what the two measures communicate, parents tend to take test scores less seriously—especially if the scores are low.

Although external exams convey valuable information, educating teachers about high expectations is key. Educators can’t hold students to a high bar if they don’t have a clear vision of what excellence looks like.

Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to assume that an A truly represents excellence. And that’s a real problem for the future of individual kids and the nation they live in. Are we ready to do something about it?

Editor’s note: This perspective was first published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. It has been posted with the author’s permission.