The Effect of Grade Inflation No One Talks About

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Fox recently looked at the mounting evidence of grade inflation.  Covid has accelerated it and “raised awareness” (can we officially call that turn of phrase a cliché yet?) about it, but the problem existed well before.  The video piece in the link presents an educator that talks about the fact that there are a lot of good students still coming out of school, but I wonder.  You see, never talked about is the fact that grade inflation demotivates students actually capable of excellence.

Think about it.  If you are an excellent student, but find you can pull  straight-A’s without a lot of effort – why bother?  If average or even below-average performance is awarded as excellence, and there is no award for actual excellence, why bother with actual excellence?  Sure grade inflation creates all sorts of mundane problems like accountants that cannot add, but worse it kills innovation and progress because those that might produce it never reach their potential.

Now, here is my problem – the best way I know of to describe what I am talking about is to discuss normal distribution curves, but that is math and apparently no one would understand what I am talking about because grade inflation.  The Fox article says:

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.

(I wonder if the SAT and ACT are what they used to be, but that is a discussion for another time.)  That’s a competitive reason we can’t deflate grades, but I think it fair to say that as people dumb down they will lack the understanding to even desire to do so to begin with.

Besides, the roots of grade inflation are quite insidious.  It started in elite schools, as the Fox video piece mentions, because when you pay that kind of cash to educate your child, you expect results.  Unfortunately, not all kids of rich parents are actually capable to of high levels of academic performance.  Sadly though when a kid can’t or won’t perform the parent starts beating on the school to do more and since the parent is paying huge bucks, the school is going to do something.  Money talks.

But the problem gets far worse in even public schools when considerations of race become involved.  Accusations start being hurled – “You failed my child because he or she is XXXX.”  Or worse yet, “My child ‘deserves’ an A because without race-based disadvantages they would have gotten one.”  Suddenly grades are about anything but actual classroom performance.

Then there is the system of grants and awards that go to schools that “innovate” programs that produce “results.”  In other words, everyone at the school get s a pay bump if grades improve and they generate a bunch of paper.  Why actually do the work if you can just generate the paper, inflate the grades bit, and go home with a pay bump.  Why do you think the school administrator population is growing ten times faster than the student or teacher populations?

Like so many of the problems we face these days, we cannot solve the problem directly.  The answer to grade inflation lies in personal character – in worrying about education more than money or power – in placing the welfare of the student and the nation ahead of one’s own personal welfare.  There are a lot of good teachers out there, but there are not enough.  We need more like this.