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Commentary
Yes, grade inflation is a thing. But it’s not the real problem
The most humiliating experience of my teaching career occurred during my first year on the job. A parent, upset about her son receiving a B- on an essay, requested a meeting with the principal and me. During the meeting, I, a nervous 23-year-old, was asked to explain how the rubric and my comments “added up” to an 82 and whether I thought the principal, who was sitting feet away, would grade the essay the same way. I stumbled, stammered and sweated through the entire meeting.
I would like to say this type of interaction is rare; however, the frequency with which parents and students try to negotiate grades has increased since I started teaching 14 years ago. Instead of encouraging the hard work of learning, traditional grading practices promote behaviors that are antithetical to the pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps ethos we’re told is the bedrock of our society. Grade grubbing, cheating and pressure from parents are hardly means to a meritocratic end, and yet, a system that positions grades as currency inevitably makes earning points the focus of school.
As the pressure on teachers to give higher grades grows, so, too, do grade point averages. For more than 50 years, administrators, school officials, policy makers and my fellow teachers have wrung their hands about grade inflation. The phrase was first coined in the 1970s by Harvard sociologist David Riesman, and since then classroom grades and GPAs have gone up and up and up. In recent years, the problem has become so extreme that some colleges have reintroduced SAT scores because grades are no longer a reliable indicator of student success.
Some see the death of meritocracy in grade inflation trends. Others see it as an extension of the cultural rot set on by woke parents demanding participation trophies for their 5-year-old T-ballers. If only we could get back to the good ol’ days when As were given only to those who deserved them, they wonder.
Grade inflation alarmists tend to ignore the history of grades and their efficacy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no natural link between grades and learning. In fact, grades as we understand them today with the spectrum of letters between A through F (a moment of silence, please, for the letter E, which was dropped because an F more clearly communicated a student’s failure), were created to facilitate communication between institutions and employers rather than to promote learning or motivate students. There is almost no research that suggests grades are necessary for students to learn. There is, however, research that illustrates the negative impact of grades on student motivation, behavior, mental health and the quality of a student’s thinking.
Perhaps most insidious is the way grades distract parents, teachers and administrators from deeper problems of educational achievement. Here, critics of grade inflation and I agree. Though grades have gone up consistently over time, reading and math scores hit an all-time low among 13-year olds while SAT and ACT scores have also dropped precipitously. The answer, however, isn’t to look to some fictitious past when increased rigor, punitive consequences for late work and more B-pluses created a golden age in American education. There is no evidence these practices ever improved student outcomes. They certainly won’t benefit the current generation of teenagers, which is in the midst of a mental health crisis and reports being disengaged and unenthusiastic about school.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no natural link between grades and learning.
So where do we go from here? I think about the problem of grades a lot like I think about our reliance on fossil fuels: Both are so entrenched in our lives that it’s hard to see a realistic way out. And yet we must. The path ahead isn’t to rebrand grades the same way we have “clean coal” — as if it’s something that actually exists. Instead, we need to end our reliance on traditional grades and create new systems based on what we know is true about learning and motivation.
One such system could be the mastery- or proficiency-based approach to assessment, which has gained traction in educational settings as varied as urban New York City and rural Vermont. In the mastery system, students work at their own pace to meet objective content or skills-based standards and are assessed based on the level of proficiency they reach by the end of each unit. For instance, rather than receiving a C on an essay about the Civil War, a teacher’s assessment is descriptive, “Faye is proficient at asking historical inquiry questions and is approaching proficiency in using evidence to back up claims”. Though the ways individual schools, districts and states implement mastery-based assessment may vary, the goals are the same — to do away with arbitrary letter grades (as well as the bad behavior they inspire) and direct the attention of all stakeholders on student progress.
If we must hold onto traditional letter grades in the short term, then individual teachers and departments would do well to use grades to promote the habits of mind that make learning more likely, such as hard work, effort, risk-taking, reflection and, yes, participation. Grading systems like labor-based grading, which I and others (see here and here) have written about elsewhere, seek to place value on the work of learning. There is also promising research supporting the use of self- and peer assessment. These approaches may have positive outcomes within a grade-granting system, but they are only half measures. We shouldn’t delude ourselves; grades will always take the oxygen out of the room if we give them a place at the table.
Educators know that the same pedagogical conversations happen year after year with little change to show for them. The discussion about grade inflation is no different, and we need to move beyond it. If we’re brave enough, we’ll see traditional grades for what they are — a distraction — and replace them with systems that redirect parent, teacher and student focus where it always should have been: on learning.
