School Grades are all about the money

Grade Inflation is Worse Than We Thought - The American Interest

American high schools are giving out higher and higher grades even as real academic ability stagnates. USA Today reports:

Recent findings show that the proportion of high school seniors graduating with an A average — that includes an A-minus or A-plus — has grown sharply over the past generation, even as average SAT scores have fallen.

In 1998, it was 38.9%. By last year, it had grown to 47%.

That’s right: Nearly half of America’s Class of 2016 are A students. Meanwhile, their average SAT score fell from 1,026 to 1,002 on a 1,600-point scale — suggesting that those A’s on report cards might be fool’s gold.

Well, it's all about the money, mainly that so many states have lottery-supported college scholarships for in-state colleges. A minimum high-school GPA is required to get such scholarships. However,

The erosion of intellectual standards is worse at the elite level: “the upward creep is most pronounced in schools with large numbers of white, wealthy students. And its especially noticeable in private schools, where the rate of inflation was about three times higher than in public schools.” 

Well, sure. Follow the money again. White, wealthy parents know the Golden Rule: whomever has the gold makes the rules. Private schools are much more vulnerable to such rule making than public schools because the parents and alumni write the check that keep them open. So their administrators' and teachers' foremost motivation is to keep those checks coming (and thus stay employed) while propagandizing that their academic standards and achievements are first rate. 

And there is this, too:

Once the students get to college, their grade-inflation bonuses do not stop. At state colleges, there is tremendous pressure to inflate to keep that lottery-scholarship money coming in, since usually a 3.0 GPA is required for students to keep the scholarships.And many professors know that disadvantaged students are far more likely to enroll in state colleges than in private ones, so they are understandably loathe to award a grade that could terminate the lottery money for students who might then have to drop out for lack of the money.

But it is not just public colleges that inflate grades. According to the Dean of Undergraduate Education at Harvard University, "The most frequently awarded grade in Harvard College is actually a straight A," while the median grade is an A-.

Grade inflation isn't just a problem at Harvard. A recent study of 200 colleges and universities found that more than 40 percent of all grades awarded were in the A range. Some have argued that these inflated grades are necessary to help students get ahead in a competitive job market. While that might be true for an individual professor or university, at the national level grade inflation is a negative-sum game that imposes serious costs on society. Therefore, universities need to take steps to bring it under control. (USNews)

I should point out that there are some academic disciplines that have resisted grade inflation mostly successfully. My daughter just graduated from the engineering university with a degree in chemical engineering, and grading on a fixed scale rather than the curve was almost universal (would you want an engineer designing, say, your airliner whose 65 percent average was awarded a B-plus?).