The series “We Create the Culture We Want,” named after the mantra, highlights certain aspects of culture at the high school that impacts students and teachers alike. This installment explores grade inflation and its effects.
As students shovel through the numerous tasks set before them, the lines of their planners continue to fill with a cascade of seemingly endless tests, essays and assignments. Students spend hours working in aims of earning one final letter grade: the sought after “A.” But this mark of exceeding expectations may not be as meaningful in today’s standards as it has been.
Between the classes of 2017 and 2019, there was a clear shift in GPA averages for high school students, where the median GPA range went from being between 3.3 and 3.7 to 3.7 and 4.0, according to the high school’s graduation profiles. This pattern has continued to the present day, where the class of 2024 median GPA ranged from a 3.7 to 4.0, with the proportion of students with this GPA range noticeably increasing in comparison to other ranges.
Chemistry teacher Steve Lantos graduated from the high school in the class of 1980, and soon after came back to teach. He’s been at the high school ever since, and he said his long tenure has allowed him to witness the grade inflation trend first hand.
“When I was here in the 70s, I think the average grade might have been a C, C+,” Lantos said. “If you think of grades in that traditional standard bell curve, it’s a small percentage of As, a larger percent of Bs, the great majority of Cs, lesser Ds, and then fewer Es. That whole curve has shifted up.”
Impacts of Grade Inflation
History teacher Patrick McGee said that students likely don’t think about the negative consequences of grade inflation that educators are considering. With each new class of sophomore Modern World History he teaches, McGee said he has able to glean less information from his students’ freshman year grades because most of them have the same high letters. He said these high grades don’t always translate to being well-equipped for his class.
“Many probably wouldn’t see it as a problem because for them, they see the high grade, it makes them feel good, and it helps their GPA,” McGee said. “But from the perspective of someone who’s trying to assess the true capability or knowledge a student may have, if that grade holds less meaning, then it’s not an accurate signal of what that student is capable of or has accomplished.”
However, some people believe having an inflated GPA could have beneficial effects. Junior Abby Mitchell said that if people were to have higher GPAs it would make grades less of a worry, allowing students to focus on other extracurricular activities.
“There’s just a lot of pressure on students to get a good grade and to work really hard on that, and it can kind of take away focus from other social things and opportunities,” Mitchell said.
Despite perceived benefits on the part of some students, McGee said that grade inflation might be working against students who are very high achieving.
“Maybe there’s a student in the class who thinks they’re one of the top in the class. Maybe they worked extra hard, they studied that extra hour, but then they come to find out that 90 percent of the kids in the class earned the same grade in the end. So they might feel it’s unfair that they work twice as hard but get the same grade,” McGee said.
McGee also said that student interactions with teachers have become focused solely on their grades.
“My colleagues and I seem to mostly agree that it feels like students are more transactional: like, ‘Is this going to be graded? How well do I need to do on it? What will the impact be on my average? Okay, thanks for that information, going to get it done, moving on.’ It doesn’t feel like there’s that internal drive for learning that concept,” McGee said.
Academic Stress and Competition
While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason behind this trend of grade inflation, Lantos said it is a societal phenomenon at schools across the country and even at the college level. He said the heart of the issue is a culture of academic stress and competition, especially relating to college admissions. With more students applying to colleges but no more colleges being created, many academic institutions have tightened their belts when it comes to granting admissions.
“We teachers are very sensitive to the stress levels that [students] are suffering through,” Lantos said. “That said, we still have to do assessments and provide grades, and provide some sort of academic experience that will prepare you for the next journey, where you’re at a college and the professors don’t care about your stress levels and aren’t sensitive to that.”
With the heightened academic competition, McGee said teachers sometimes make small decisions to try to ease stress levels by forgiving an assignment or rounding up, which ultimately result in higher grades across the board. Simultaneously, as a humanities teacher, McGee said grading is a lot more subjective, which gives teachers more room for leniency.
“In the humanities it’s a little harder than in math or science because in math, if you get the wrong answers on the test, it’s very straightforward,” McGee said. “But there’s a lot more gray area with English and social studies.”
Senior Marla Li said that grade-associated pressure stems from worries about college applications or her parents’ academic expectations.
“I think I’ve seen a lot of people just really driven by getting good grades. If they don’t, it’s like the end of the world or something,” Li said.
According to senior Maya Kushner, teachers giving out “easy A’s” could end up sabotaging students in their future, but the opposite extreme can be just as problematic.
“They’re not always gonna get a teacher like that, so then they wouldn’t know how to improve their grades, like studying better, but I do think a teacher making it a point to never give anyone an A is bad,” Kushner said.
McGee said that the high school is an especially rigorous and competitive institution, which contributes to the culture of grade inflation. Having worked previously at the New York City Public Schools, he said most of his old students didn’t care as much about their grades.
“The grades were much more varied, and a large proportion of kids were earning 65s because they knew that was the number they needed to pass the class and that’s all they cared about. They did not care about the A,” McGee said. “So when I came to Brookline, it was like stepping into a very different world. I was immediately working with students who were used to and capable of earning high grades.”
Transparency Surrounding Grading
With grades increasingly visible, some students check Canvas multiple times a day to keep track of their school work. Lantos said that although he values the new transparency with grades that comes from technology, it also might be contributing to the high school’s culture of academic stress and competition.
“There was a trust of faith before it was all transparent where kids would just rely on the teacher to calculate their grade and the grade is what the grade is,” Lantos said. “I’m telling you if I make a mistake of putting an incorrect grade in something that a kid has gotten back, I know within minutes because the kid is showing up, or I’ll get an email, sometimes from a parent.”
With every grade inputted into Canvas, students have the ability to quickly realize they’ve received a grade they’re unsatisfied with, while teachers can easily make changes. McGee said another factor to grade inflation is that students have become increasingly argumentative about their grades, making it more likely for teachers to default to a slightly higher grade from the start.
“The teacher is preemptively avoiding a headache, an argument. They think to themselves, maybe if I give the kid a B+, there’s going to be a conversation, they’re going to come see me about it, I’m going to have to justify it, they might get a guidance counselor involved, or I could just round this up to an A- and call it a day,” McGee said.
Dealing with Grade Inflation
McGee said it’s hard to combat grade inflation in his own class, since his efforts so far to equitably attack grade inflation have not actually changed the proportion of students ending up with high grades. He said it is hard to determine the reason behind this stagnation: whether it’s because he’s not actually making the class more challenging and needs to go further, or whether students rose to the challenge.
“One of the things I introduced more of this year was more multiple choice tests. That seems to be better at differentiating the students, but that’s only one form of assessment for one thing that determines their grade,” McGee said. “So even if a student is, say, scoring lower on average on multiple choice assessments, they compensate for that in the grade by completing all homework or doing all these other assignments we do in class and they still end up with a pretty high grade.”
However, specific teachers deciding to combat grade inflation through experimenting with making their classes harder has its drawbacks. According to Li, it would be unfair for students to be graded differently due to just a difference in teachers.
“I don’t think it’s fair if one teacher is making the class really easy for people, and then the other is making it like, the worst class ever,” Li said.
Lantos also said that the pandemic drastically worsened grade inflation. As teachers struggled to make online classes engaging, the amount of work students completed lagged and expectations decreased. With the work so much less rigorous, many students received very high grades. The hyper grade inflation during the pandemic and remote schooling has had lasting consequences as students got used to getting high grades for doing relatively little work.
“It took two full years to erase that meaningless year of hyper grade inflation. So now, we’re kind of back, but we’re in the larger culture still of general grade inflation,” Lantos said.
Lantos said that grades aren’t even the best way to assess learning, and that they often lead to schools often prioritizing efficiency over educational soundness.
“If you got a B, I don’t know if that B was because you did as much work as you could and that’s the grade you got, or if you just blew off the quarter and didn’t do hard work. There’s nothing in the letter that allows some third person observer to know,” Lantos said. “If there was some sort of comment behind that letter grade, that would be far more meaningful. We’ll never go to that system—it takes a lot more time.”
In the end, Lantos said that the culture of academic competition central to grade inflation needs to be diffused.
“College is not the end all. That’s something that we teachers try to make mention of,” Lantos said. “We’re training you to be able to apply to school and then get into college. But your life doesn’t end there.”
