The Anatomy of Grade Inflation

It’s no secret that today’s teachers hand out more high grades than yesterday’s did. Though SAT scores haven’t significantly improved in recent decades, 39 percent of the students taking the SAT last year reported having an A average; in 1984, only 28 percent did. But what’s the underlying reason for the grade inflation? It’s not that teachers are simply going easy on the kids, contends Birk, a freelance writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s rather that they are using grades to do too many things.

"Teachers," she says, "tend to give grades for many different reasons: to measure content mastery, to chart progress, to motivate students, and to provide information to a variety of audiences, from students to parents to college admissions boards." As a result, the meaning of an A on a report card is murky: It could mean the student mastered all of the assigned material, or merely that the student tried hard—or something else entirely.

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