Grading Graders

It’s no surprise that high school students – and their parents – have pressured teachers and schools to push their grades as high as possible in the mad rush to maximize the probability of getting into college. With the great recession of 2007-????, that pressure accelerated as the quest for financial aid became even more critical to many; so many scholarships are grade-linked. The pressure to avoid being labeled an under-performing school under the No Child Left Behind Act didn’t help the situation. Also, with fewer children able to afford private school, some prep schools have responded to the competition for the remaining kids whose parents can foot the bill with pledges of easier grade criteria for stellar marks. With an over-proliferation of As, the reported academic results of so many high schools and prep schools have become meaningless, as colleges track the experience of such students when they reach college and reevaluate various schools’ credibility on their students’ transcripts.

Arkansas provides a fairly typical example of this phenomenon, which has occurred in so many state and private schools: “In 2001, the Legislature passed a law … requiring the state Department of Education to identify schools with a ‘statistically significant variance’ between students’ ACT scores and their grade-point averages… Lawmakers were concerned because ‘they would see students going to college with great (high school) grades, and their test scores did not match up with those grades, and the students were not at the level they thought they would be,’ said Rep. Bill Abernathy, D-Mena, chairman of the House Education Committee.

“A report released in 2000 by the college testing service ACT Inc. showed that more than one-fourth of students who graduated from Arkansas high schools with above-average GPAs required remedial classes upon entering Arkansas colleges.” ArkansasNews.com (March 1^st). The legislature postponed the application of the law, and grade inflation remains an issue in Arkansas. The number of As has increased across the U.S. by a sizable number from the late 1960s to this decade, from 23% to over 40% today, and the number of Cs has dropped from 29% down to just over 15%, according to endgradeinflation.org. Do schools that employ grading curves or more restrictive practices really hurt their students’ chances of getting into college? Not if the admissions department has been tracking and correlating grades with subsequent performance a t the college level.

But high schools and private schools aren’t the only academic institutions pumping up the grades. That infection has now spread to the nation’s colleges and universities as well, but only a few bastions of higher learning are doing anything about it: “With college grades creeping ever higher, a few universities have taken direct action against grade inflation. Most notably, Princeton adopted guidelines in 2004 providing that no more than 35 percent of undergraduate grades should be A’s, a policy that remains controversial on campus.

“Others have taken a less direct approach, leaving instructors free to award whatever grades they like but expanding their transcripts to include information giving graduate schools and employers a fuller picture of what the grades mean… Dartmouth transcripts include median grades, along with the number of courses in which the student exceeded, equaled or came in lower than those medians. Columbia transcripts show the percentage of students in the course who earned an A… At Reed College, transcripts are accompanied by an explanatory card. Last year’s graduating class had an average G.P.A. of 3.20, it says, and only 10 percent of the class graduated with a G.P.A. of 3.67 or higher… As part of the [the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill’s] long effort to clarify what grades really mean, [university sociologist Andrew] Perrin now leads a committee that is working with the registrar on plans to add extra information — probably median grades, and perhaps more — to transcripts. In addition, they expect to post further statistics providing context online and give instructors data on how their grading compares with their colleagues’.”

America’s competitive edge is not solved by telling ourselves how much better we are doing and then jacking up everybody’s GPA. Tackling this problem requires more rigorous training, better teachers and higher actual expectations with real measurements of success. We are in a race for our very survival, and game-playing is not the answer.

I’m Peter Dekom hoping that America’s schools get it real very soon.