Grade Inflation Is a Myth. Here’s Why.

A new academic year is upon us, and it is sure to bring with it some of our most beloved, time-honored traditions: back-to-school shopping, overly ambitious commitments to extra-curricular activities, and pundits complaining about grade inflation. Grade inflation is a perennial favorite when it comes to topics for op-eds, and we’ve been treated to countless iterations of the same argument over the years. Grades, these writers will have us believe, are much higher now than they have been in the past, and the reason is a worrying loss of rigor and diminished academic standards.

This prevailing narrative about grade inflation serves a purpose. It is meant to stoke fears about the state of our schools and colleges and to vilify the educators working hard in classrooms across the country. The problem is that these commonly held beliefs about grade inflation are incorrect. They comprise a troubling myth about education: that are students are not learning as much as they used to because they are not being evaluated as strictly.

First, we do not have very good national data about the types of grades that are given across K-12 and college. We would need more systematic research to be able to say with any degree of certainty that grades are now higher across the board than they were in years past. What we have instead are vibes, anecdotal opinion pieces, and one-off studies from individual institutions.

But let’s say it’s possible to get more conclusive data and that this information revealed that grades were indeed uniformly higher in all of our schools and colleges. Even in this contrived scenario there could be many different reasons for elevated grades. In fact, a group of Cornell researchers, worried about the trend of higher grades at their institution, tried to identify the root cause of the historical changes to the types of grades that had been given, and in the end could find no clear answer to their question. They ultimately suggested that it might be due to the better quality of the students themselves.

All of this could be true, and we would still not be witnessing grade inflation. The idea of grade inflation is tied directly to the perceived quality of academic work, the standards used by instructors to evaluate this work, and the belief that these standards are more lenient now than they were in the past. To prove grade inflation exists, we would first need to see objective benchmarks for learning in a given course in every context where that course is taught and agreement across vast numbers of faculty and educational institutions as to the criteria for evaluating those benchmarks. I probably don’t need to tell you that this is not happening anywhere.

We would then need to see evidence of consistent evaluation over time and proof that instructors were using the shared criteria to now give higher grades for the same level of performance that would have garnered lower grades in the past. We have no such data. It is not just difficult, then, to say that grade inflation exists. It is actually impossible to do so.

Finally, we have more evidence now than ever before that grades do not even perform the most basic function for which they were intended: serving as measurements of learning. Because grades are often given as numbers, we have been duped into thinking that grades themselves are somehow scientific, mathematically sound, objective quantifications of student learning. But they are not any of these things. In my book Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It, I call this the measurement fallacy.

At most, grades are subjective indicators of student progress on learning goals established by an individual teacher for a particular course. The grade a student receives in a course could change significantly if they took the same course at a different time with a different instructor. Consequently, grades do not provide some sort of universal certification of knowledge in a particular subject. They merely represent the degree to which a student made headway on a very prescribed set of goals at a specific moment in their academic journey.

Since grades do not effectively measure learning, they should never be seen as proxies for rigor and standards, which is a key tenet of grade inflation. There is nothing inherent to a letter or number that makes it any better at conveying whether or not students are learning than other kinds of feedback that we give them, and it is important for us to decouple grades from conversations about academic standards, because of their serious flaws.

So, the shadowy specter of grade inflation is just that — immaterial and without substance. Those who continue to promote this myth do so because it is easier than diving into the harder work of education reform. There are certainly many problems we need to tackle in our schools and colleges in this country. Grade inflation, however, is not one of them.