Grade Inflation and the Collapse of Academic Standards

Commentary

When A becomes the average grade, is it still an A?

This question isn’t hypothetical anymore. The most common grade today in U.S. high schools and colleges is an A.

So, are we seeing an unexpected cohort of savants, a new generation of ubiquitously gifted students who make our Founding Fathers—many of whom were in their 20s when they created a brand-new country—look like amateurs?

Or are we experiencing the logical consequences of decades of grade inflation? Given that today’s students are putting up some of the worst ACT scores in decades, my money’s on the latter explanation.

You can’t tell me that 43 percent of ACT-takers in 2023 failed to meet any of the necessary benchmarks to succeed in college—and then went on to earn the same or higher grades compared with previous generations of students who actually succeeded on the ACT.

So why are teachers and professors proffering higher grades for lower performances, handing out A’s like food samples at the grocery store? Even the National Education Association (NEA) has admitted: “It’s not because all students are above average. Even as grades go up, student achievement—as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress—is going down.”

The real cause, as NEA explained with surprising candor, is decade after decade of teachers awarding A’s for subpar work “due to constant, consequential demands by students, parents, and administrators.” From tense conversations with parents to strongly worded directives from administration, the pressures are many.

One teacher said: “I’ve been told to pass every student if they come to class. It doesn’t matter if they do zero work, like absolutely zero work. Admin says I can’t fail them.”

While I believe that teachers should hold firm in the face of these pressures—refusing to commit acts of injustice just to placate parents or principals—I do sympathize with their position. (In fact, I had to deal with similar pressures on some occasions when I was a teacher, and it was not easy to navigate.) Still, the net result isn’t good for students or teachers, or society.

What is the net result? We end up with 84 percent of undergraduates at Harvard University boasting an A or A-minus, and 213 simultaneous valedictorians at a high school in Arlington, Virginia.

One university—the University of Michigan—is going a step further by covering student grades entirely during the first year in order to curb a “mental health crisis.” (One wonders whether one cause of the crisis is the fact that students never had the healthy experience of overcoming some grade-related adversity in high school.) Essentially, starting in 2027, grades in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will not count toward a student’s GPA or appear on his transcript for the first year. It’s a free pass, a blank check for the first academic year.

Angela Dillard, vice provost for undergraduate education, insisted that the initiative was not about “blaming students for being unprepared” but about placing “blame on institutional systems.”

All this grade inflation (or grade denial, in the case of the University of Michigan) should alarm us for a number of reasons. First, as NEA points out, a recent study found that high school students who receive lenient grades are less likely to pass later courses and graduate from high school, and will earn significantly less money during their lives. The study also demonstrated the reality of grade inflation, reporting that the average high school GPA in America rose to 3.1 in 2020 from 2.6 in 1985, while the average college GPA went to 3.2 from 2.8.

But, of course, the sickness and its consequences go much deeper than just poor career outcomes or wacky statistics. It’s the sickness afflicting Western society as a whole, nigh unto death: a preference for egalitarianism over meritocracy and a repudiation—or at least ignorance—of our own cultural heritage. Such attitudes are a form of societal suicide.

The modern educational system has moved away from its foundation of forming students rigorously in classical languages and classic texts. As a result, today’s students have little sense of their cultural heritage, only the murkiest of conceptions about the core debates and ideas that shaped our civilization, no cohesive understanding of the world and how various disciplines interweave and coalesce, and an outrageous ignorance of their own history.

Far too often, egalitarianism, utilitarianism, Marxism, and a knee-jerk suspicion of the Western educational and cultural tradition has dominated modern academia, thus tragically and catastrophically depriving students of their birthright. Grade inflation is just a low-level manifestation of the same neo-Marxist egalitarian trend that rejected the orderly, hierarchical structure of reality as understood by Western civilization for centuries—and sought to subvert it.

There’s a correlation between classical education and higher academic performance—classically trained students generally score higher on the ACT than their non-classically trained counterparts—but even more than that, classical education provides a formation in the great ideas, arts, and achievements of our civilization.

A relativistic and egalitarian mindset refuses to hold students to high academic standards, it’s true. It even more adamantly refuses to steep those same students in the best that our culture has to offer.

Is it any wonder that the snow-clad peaks of academic achievement appear to be behind us? To return to them, we must first recover a desire for the clear, alpine exhilaration of the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty—what classical education is based on—while recognizing the hierarchical order of the universe that these transcendentals imply.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.