What is Grade Inflation

       Much has been in the news of late concerning economic inflation. In simplest terms, this means that prices for the things we buy are increasing. However, this is not the only type of inflation a family with a soon-to-be college student should be concerned about. There’s also such a thing as grade inflation.

After a round of admission decisions was released at a coveted university near my high school this spring, an in-the-know parent inquired as to why we’re not able to get more students who seemingly work harder and harder and churn out better grades and test scores than in years prior into that school. The answer? Grade inflation.

This is a very similar concept to economic inflation where something that used to cost $1 now cost $2. While it used to take a 1250 SAT score and 3.75 GPA to get into the school referenced above, I feel like a student really needs around a 1350 score and a 3.9 GPA now. This is all simply due to the fact that when it comes to college admissions, students are very much in competition with each other and that competition inevitably brings a raising of a bar. The repercussions of this grade inflation are far-reaching.

At the student level, it means that students have to perform better in more difficult classes. If they really want to get into that college of their dreams, they may well have to spend more time doing homework and standardized test prep. Indeed testing is where grade inflation might be most pronounced.

It might be easy to argue here that this is exactly why colleges are starting to move away from testing, but I fear we could see the opposite effect. Before standardized testing was a thing, college admissions were based mostly on grades as well as how well a student could bolster their resume. Unfortunately, that bolstering often served as an indicator of one’s background and financial means and this is what often decided whether a student was admitted or not. Standardized testing was introduced as a way to mitigate this effect. 

Grade inflation is a problem when it comes to test scores. All students can’t make a perfect SAT score, but I’m not sure that moving away from them all together is the answer as this will force students to do more to build those resumes. That’s probably easier to do for more advantaged students and we could end up back where we were nearly 100 years ago before the advent of standardized testing. Perhaps a re-calibration of standardized test scores is a potential solution. 

Anyway, for now, many colleges are still requiring test scores. Those seem to inch up every year as do GPAs, the rigor of courses students select, and the quality of their involvement in all sorts of things outside of the classroom. This means today’s students must work harder than yesterday’s, and they’ll have to work even harder tomorrow. 

Understanding the Modern Student

         I’ve started to notice a slight uptick in the level of frustration parents and some veteran teachers have towards their students. So, I’ve spent some time dwelling on the cause of this and believe much of the divide might be in the lack of understanding of what makes the modern student tick. I think it’s worth taking some time to discuss the evolving learning style of today’s high school student.

As I write this in 2022, I can say that parents of most current high school students came into their own right alongside the internet. I graduated high school in 1997 and can probably put myself in this category. I remember well the ridiculous sound of my dial-up modem I used to check my primitive email. I don’t think I probably used the internet at all for research in high school, but by the time I graduated college I was pretty good at it. I certainly didn’t have a computer in my pocket at all times during my formative years, so in some ways I think I got the best of the old school and new school.

Today’s high school student has literary had the world’s collective knowledge at their fingertips since pre-school. They know they can access whatever they need to know at any given time. They can just “google it”, right? But, that ubiquitous verb didn’t exist during the formative years of other generations. We had to know things. We hoarded information because we knew that if and when we needed it, we’d have to already have it.

Not so anymore. The modern student keeps a tidy information bank. Remember when you used to go on a trip and you’d print out maps or write out directions before you left? Ha! Now, we just figure out when we get there with our phone. We just don’t need to know as much already as we used to.

The modern student knows this and so the line our parents and teachers used to feed us “you might need to know this one day,” falls flat. The only thing they have an interest in is, “you will need to know this one day.”

I think there is a middle ground here. The modern student and their predecessors will both do well to understand each other. Today’s high school students should understand that the more they know, the more enlightened they are and the clearer the world’s intertwined concepts will become. Older generations should recognize too though, that the modern student is kind of right. They don’t need to know as much as we did. Before they take off on that trip, they’ll be fine if their dad never taught them how to change a flat tire. There are thousands of other dads with instructional videos on the internet they can watch if and when they get a flat. 

From the educator standpoint, we need to work at finding this balance and make sure we draw connections between what we teach and its practicality. We have to say, “you need to know this because…” Students must understand that you can’t google everything on-demand, in the moment, and learning how the world works just means you’re not going to be an idiot as an adult. If students and educators can find some middle ground here, we’ll both get a little farther down the road.