What is the problem with grade inflation?
Inflation is all over the news, but it might not be a big problem when it comes to grades.
Note: This is the second in a series of blog posts on grades. I wrote the original draft of this in April 2020 and have made slight edits to adjust the tense and content.
Conservative education group the Fordham Institute published a report on the perils of grade inflation in 2018, shortly before I wrote the first draft of this blog. The topic is a big deal to the think tank; They wrote about it again in 2023 and 2024. Grade inflation is a phenomenon where grades for students gradually increase over time. The implication is that it is easier to get a good grade as teachers relax their standards. In the original 2018 article, the Fordham Institute tapped American University economist Seth Gershenson to explore 10 years of high school transcripts and grades in Algebra 1, a required course for all students, for all public school students in the state of North Carolina.
In a follow-up blog post featuring the Gershenson study for the foundation’s website, Fordham’s Brandon Wright recounted a series produced by the Boston Globe of valedictorians who graduated from high schools in the city. One such valedictorian struggled in college at Bryn Mawr College, a highly selective private women’s college in Pennsylvania. The culprit, according to Wright, was that inner-city high schools were handing out easy A’s to students who had not earned the grades.
The proof offered by Wright in the Fordham blog post is the study of North Carolina high schools by Gershenson. Curiously, Gershenson concluded that grade inflation was occurring more often at schools filled with well-off students rather than in the underfunded inner-city or rural schools in the state. Over the 10-year period studied, Gershenson found that the median grade in schools with mostly students from well-off families rose by a little less than one-third of a letter grade (the difference between an A- and an A) while those with predominantly less well-off students rose by about half of that. Kevin Mahnken, writing for education blog The 74 came to the opposite conclusion of Wright after reading the Gershenson study, noting that wealthy schools were more apt to suffer from grade inflation at the hands of parents eager to boost their students’ grades.
The claims of both Gershenson and Wright deserve attention. Will a steady rise in the average letter grade given to students lessen the ability to rely on grades as a measure of academic success in school, as well as an accurate predictor of future success in college? First, we need to take a closer look at what is going on with grade inflation.
In the Gershenson study, schools in North Carolina experienced rising high school graduation rates over the decade of data analyzed. This tracked with the national trend as high schools across the country saw an increase in graduation rates leading up to the Pandemic. College entrance exam scores in North Carolina and around the nation were more or less flat at the same. This leads Gershenson to conclude that grades were going up, but other measures suggested students were ill-prepared for postsecondary education. Gershenson concluded that, because a significant number of students who earned a B in Algebra 1 scored below proficient on the state’s end-of-course examination, a required standardized assessment administered to all students completing Algebra 1 in the state, many students were not prepared for the demands of a college course.
While high school graduation rates rose in North Carolina during the time of the Gershenson study, so too did college persistence rates. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the research arm of the organization that serves as a warehouse of educational information related to students in all grade levels, reported that slightly more students (a 2.6% increase since 2009) in North Carolina completed the first year of college and persisted into the second year. More students were graduating from high school, and more students were then staying in college between their first and second year of college. During this time, test scores were flat, which draws attention to the ability to rely on standardized assessments and college entrance exams. What are they testing if they cannot predict an increase in college success?
In my previous blog post, I pointed to the research that freshman year grade point average has served as a better predictor of future academic success than the ACT scores that Gershenson analyzed. Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli noted this in the executive summary of the Gershenson report, writing that “[m]uch research shows that students’ cumulative high school GPAs—which are typically an average of grades in twenty-five or more courses—are highly correlated with later academic outcomes.” GPA is not just correlated with future success; the link is much stronger than that. The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research has further shown that the GPA at the end of 9th grade, when many of these students in North Carolina took Algebra 1, is an accurate predictor of future academic success.
Neither the state assessment nor the college entrance exams are the best available tools to pick out which students are likely to do well in the first year of college. Algebra 1 is a course that many students take during the 9th grade, a common time to be in the first year in a new school. We should trust the grades assigned by the teachers before jumping to conclusions about how well students are prepared for high school graduation or college based on a measure generated from a single-day event like a standardized test score.
Organizations like the College Board, makers of the SAT, produce a steady stream of reports and studies that suggest that their test scores remain flat and that this is proof that grade inflation is a pernicious problem, falsely signaling that students are ill-prepared for college. However, the test makers have a vested interest in ensuring their tests remain the prevailing measure of student success and preparation for college. Rejecting the grades given by teachers who spend more than 9 months out of the year with a student devalues the professional judgment of the teacher in favor of a company that hands out a packet of paper to the student for one morning’s work.