The Adverse Consequences of Grade Inflation

When every student "earns" an above average GPA, it's difficult to differentiate between students who are really above average and those who are just a little above average.

Extra credit for AP courses, parental lobbying and genuine hard work by the most competitive students have combined to shatter any semblance of a Bell curve, one in which 'A's are reserved only for the very best. For example, of the 47,317 applications the University of California, Los Angeles, received for this fall's freshman class, nearly 21,000 had GPAs of 4.0 or above.

That's also making it harder for the most selective colleges -- who often call grades the single most important factor in admissions -- to join in a growing movement to lessen the influence of standardized tests.

"We're seeing 30, 40 valedictorians at a high school because they don't want to create these distinctions between students," said Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. "If we don't have enough information, there's a chance we'll become more heavily reliant on test scores, and that's a real negative to me."

And what are the adverse consequences of this egalitarian attitude?

More than 70 percent of schools and districts analyzed by an education audit company called SchoolMatch had average GPAs significantly higher than they should have been based on their standardized test scores -- including the school systems in Chicago, Illinois, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Denver, Colorado, San Bernardino, California, and Columbus, Ohio. That raises concerns about students graduating from those schools unprepared for college.

"They get mixed in with students from more rigorous schools and they just get blown away," said SchoolMatch CEO William Bainbridge.

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I knew that someday this would come true: "...And all the children are above average." - Garrison Keillor