College application deadlines in January are approaching. As they do, students and especially parents are having tough conversations and revising their school lists and expectations in one direction: downward. Ninety percent of parents believe that their children are at or above grade level proficiency, yet, according to standardized measures, 12th-grade students have the lowest math and reading preparedness on record. Only 22% of 12th-grade students are proficient in math, and only 35% in reading.
Typically, families only realize how inflated grades are when they start looking into colleges. For instance, in 2024, the average unweighted GPA of an admitted student to UCLA was a perfect 4.0. In other words, the average student had never received a "B" in any class throughout all of high school, and potentially never even an "A-minus."
With that realization comes another one: how unprepared their "top performing" students are. As the owner of a tutoring company, I see and hear some version of the following countless times: "My kid just got her SAT score back, and it is much lower than we expected. She is a top performer at her school but scored in the 1100s."
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SAT and ACT scores are a rude awakening, both because parents have been misled about the academic preparedness of their kids for so long and because it’s often too late to go back and relearn everything now.
The University of California, San Diego’s latest research on the academic preparedness of its students highlights the danger: 25% of its incoming students who didn’t know how to do middle school math had perfect 4.0 GPAs in their high school math classes. Their grades did not reflect their knowledge at all, and thus, a top-performing student as measured by grades could just as easily be below the national average as above it.
In that context, an 1100 on the SAT (which puts the student in the top 40% of SAT test takers) is actually a sign, not that the student scored lower than expected, but that the student with stellar grades performed according to expectations. But parents, who assume that an A-average means their child’s academic preparedness is above average, are duped into false expectations.
The takeaway: grades alone often tell students, their parents and colleges very little about a student’s actual academic preparedness.
But there is no easy way to now deflate grades. High schools that do so, especially while most colleges still have not returned to requiring an SAT or ACT for admissions consideration, would disadvantage their students with lower grades than those of other applicants.
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Not all is lost. There are more tools than simply grades. In fact, there are better tools for assessing a student’s relative and absolute academic preparedness: standardized measures of that academic preparedness.
The College Board, which administers both the SAT and AP exams, should expand its AP exam offerings — as it has already begun doing with an AP Pre-Calculus exam. We no longer have to wonder whether a student’s "A" in Pre-Calculus means that they know Pre-Calculus or do not even know middle school or even elementary school math.
This is not hyperbole. The University of California, San Diego detailed that 12% of its students did not meet middle school level proficiency for math, and, among this group, 42% had taken Pre-Calculus or Calculus in high school. Furthermore, as previously mentioned, 25% of them had perfect 4.0 grades in math throughout high school. When grades, even perfect grades, are meaningless, we need another measure, which is exactly what more AP exams would provide.
It is bad enough that, without these measures, students (and their parents) are not receiving accurate information about their educational knowledge and skill. But misleading students deprives the least prepared students with the opportunity to get the additional help they need and the most prepared students with the opportunity to achieve higher — neither group has any incentive to strive beyond the (meaningless) "A."
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It is, thus, the case that a truly top-performing student, who could have achieved a 1500 on the SAT, is denied the knowledge and skill that she otherwise would have acquired if he or she had been required to achieve a higher standard.
That comes at a devastating cost: the student is then less likely not only to get into a better college but to afford college — many colleges will give students a full scholarship if they have a 1500 SAT score. Furthermore, students with a 1500 on the SAT are, all other variables held constant, much more likely to graduate on time with less debt, persist in a STEM major (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and earn more.
Grade inflation is not a harmless embellishment or a victimless lie: it depresses academic preparedness while simultaneously hiding the decline so that students are pushed along through an education system without requiring that they learn and acquire skills to advance. That’s how we end up with students who can’t do elementary school math but have perfect grades in high school math — and then college graduates who essentially have a worthless degree but tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.
While grade inflation is not going away, we can at least put those grades in the context of a standardized measure of academic preparedness. Expand the use of standardized testing to cover all high school classes so that struggling students can receive the help they need, top-performing students can achieve their potential, students and parents can understand a student’s academic preparedness, and colleges can select students who are best matched to succeed at their institutions.
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