The Illusion of Grade Inflation
Last summer, my friends and I had the chance to attend classes at another school for a month. We thought we had the academic game figured out. During our first Philosophy exam, we each submitted essays that we were confident would earn a perfect grade; after all, we incorporated all relevant points from the reading and paid special attention to our grammar. Yet, to our utter disbelief, our professor still gave each of us a grade of 2/4–a fail! This experience forced us to re-evaluate our abilities: are we truly meeting the standards of academic excellence, or are we merely deluding ourselves with a false sense of achievement from the perfect or line-of-9 scores we often receive in school?
We attributed this to a phenomenon known as grade inflation, where students are given grades beyond what they deserve, often to keep them from failing or to give them better prospects in college–a trend that is becoming more prevalent in schools nationwide. However, grade inflation may only give students misleading evaluations of their abilities, preventing them from fully maximizing their learning.
Originally, grades were intended to serve as one of the more objective measures of academic achievement. A higher general average, for instance, should be indicative of more “academic success.” However, similar to economic inflation (where purchasing power diminishes due to rising prices), “inflating” students’ grades defeats grade value because it no longer serves as a reliable and objective reflection of a person’s abilities. As such, some students do everything to achieve high scores, becoming content with perfect scores without pushing themselves academically because they believe they are already meeting the necessary standards. However, “perfection” is subjective–different people have different perceptions of what deserves a “perfect” grade. Just because you received a perfect score on an essay doesn’t necessarily mean you fully understand the material or have writing skills at par with other institutions. As such, grade inflation may give students a false sense of mastery–fooling them into believing they have mastered a concept when they haven’t.
Theoretically, this wouldn’t be a problem in a society that didn’t place so much emphasis on numerical grades. After all, learning begins by acknowledging what we don’t know to find out what we can know. Grades reduce learning to mere data, which doesn’t capture the full extent of someone’s learning. However, despite various articles and scholarly journals calling to shift the standards of measuring academic performance away from “just grades,” this way of thinking is already so deeply entrenched in our institutions that it will take quite some time to change. As it stands, society still defines “mastery” by a student’s grade point average.
This is why, realistically speaking, pushing for a stop to grade inflation is deluding ourselves, as many students would struggle to thrive in such an environment. Colleges, for instance, still emphasize grades as a criterion for admission. Forty percent of your University Predicted Grade (UPG) will comprise your high school grade. Similarly, your high school grades are one of the most important factors when applying for some colleges abroad. In a way, inflating grades might be a way for teachers to support their students–giving them better prospects as they apply for their dream schools but at the cost of genuine learning.
Thus, as students, it becomes our responsibility to take ownership of our own learning and go beyond what is expected of us in classrooms. We must challenge ourselves to solve more difficult problems, read books from different genres, and be comfortable embracing academic risks–taking on a growth mindset. Only if we dare to push ourselves beyond what our grades define us to be can we reach our maximum potential.
