By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
High school students are getting higher grades for lower performance, according to substantial data released in the May 2022 ACT report “Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade.”
While the report documents how grade inflation increased substantially during the 2020 and 2021 years, grade inflation had been consistently on the rise for several decades. This recent acceleration is likely due to the difficulty teachers faced assigning grades to when students were isolated at home in distance learning, or faced slower coursework during hybrid instruction. Many schools imposed grading rules that prevented assigning grades lower than the student had previously achieved pre-COVID. And major learning losses are documented for reading and especially math.
The ACT report extends the findings of a 2019 federal study comparing students’ high school transcripts with the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests (NAEP also known as “the Nation’s Report Card”) that revealed students’ average test scores were continuing to go down while their high school grade point averages (GPA) continuously climbed over the last decade. High school students were taking more courses in science and math but many were learning less.
Grade inflation occurs when students are assigned a higher grade for learning less than before. “The overall grade point average (GPA) earned by high school graduates increased to 3.11 in 2019, compared to 3.00 in 2009.” But “the average NAEP mathematics score earned by high school graduates attaining a rigorous curriculum in 2019 was 184, a four-point decrease compared to 2009” with similar declines in performance in other fields as well. Because of this contrary situation where high school GPA’s are going up but test scores are going down, there is pressure placed on the NAEP to “better align” with school assessments—simply, water down the NAEP so it reflects the false gains in high school GPA.
While the pandemic has accelerated grade inflation over these last two years, it has been present ever since the drive to increase high school graduation and college attendance rates became mandates from most state education boards and authorities. Since college degrees to some extent ensure a much higher income, there has been a major push to increase high school graduation rates from roughly 70 percent to 95 percent in most states. For more than a decade, many school administrators have imposed a variety of rules that prevent failing students from receiving failing grades. This includes strategies ranging from having failing students repeat the same assessments until they have guessed the right answers (without understanding), to forcing teachers to use a grading scales where a zero starts at 50 percent, thus allowing students who know nothing to guess their way through a multiple choice test, achieving over 20 percent correct by chance, and receiving a “C” (50% + 20% = 70%) while knowing nothing!
These and other top-down commands heavily promoted by Education Schools nationwide have been adopted by local school administrators who are only following the directives of state education authorities to reach a 95 percent graduation rate. Meanwhile, many teachers are becoming more frustrated by this erosion of their professional responsibilities in grading.
This widespread grade inflation also convinced some students to pursue college when they were not “college able.” There are now over 39 million college drop-outs who started to take community college or university coursework but have quit. Increased tuition costs are a factor for some drop outs. But failure to have the knowledge and skills to pursue college level work is a huge factor that has been growing due to high school grade inflation.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, almost 42 percent of students entering 4-year colleges and nearly two-thirds of those entering community colleges have to take at least one remedial course. The more high schools inflated grades, the more remedial courses students had to take, and the lower their chances of completing a degree.
American colleges are now facing a significant decline in enrolment from the pandemic and are seeking ways to bring back the 39 million students who never finished. These data suggest that up to half of those students were victims of high school grade inflation and were not college-able.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.
The ACT report can be accessed at:
https://www.act.org/content/act/en/research/pdfs/R2134-Grade-Inflation-Continues-to-Grow-in-the-Past-Decade-Final-Accessible.html
2019 NAEP High School Transcript Study (HSTS) Results can be found at:
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/hstsreport/#home