Grade Inflation Nation
The broken feedback loop keeping parents, students, and colleges in the dark | Charting the Course
Early in my career, I taught public policy as an adjunct at Governors State University, a public university in the southern suburbs of Chicago.
One of my first assignments asked students to write about a policy issue that mattered to them — why it was important, and what solutions they could explore to solve it.
As I handed them back their assignments at the next week’s class, the mood in the room shifted. Students were stunned. Several told me these were the lowest grades they had ever received at the university.
I understood their frustration. They had done what was asked of them. They turned in the assignment, showed up to class, and put words on a page. By the standards they were used to, that should have been enough. But the writing wasn’t strong. Their arguments were underdeveloped, sources were thin, and basic mechanics were a problem.
What struck me wasn’t the pushback itself — it was how genuine their surprise was. These weren’t students trying to negotiate a grade they knew they hadn’t earned. They honestly believed they had done well. Somewhere along the way, the system had told them they were performing at a level they weren’t.
I also understood the incentive I was supposed to follow. Adjuncts live and die by course evaluations and enrollment numbers. A reputation as a tough grader doesn’t get you rehired — it gets you replaced. The rational move was to hand out B’s, keep everyone comfortable, and secure my next semester.
That experience has stayed with me as I’ve watched grade inflation become one of the most pervasive and least confronted problems in American education. What I saw in that classroom wasn’t a failure of individual students or individual teachers. It was a symptom of a system where no one has an incentive to tell the truth.
All Incentives Point One Direction
Even though my experience was in a post-secondary environment, the pressure I felt to inflate grades is not unique to college. The incentives to inflate in K-12 are stronger, more embedded, and harder to escape.
Start with the classroom teacher. Most teachers who inflate grades are not being told to do so. They are making a rational calculation to avoid a situation they know will follow if they don’t.
A rigorous grade often means a frustrated parent. A frustrated parent often means a phone call to the principal. A phone call to the principal means a meeting, a justification, and the mental labor of defending a grade that, in most cases, the teacher will be pressured to change anyway. Most teachers would rather give the B and move on with their day.
But the pressure does not stop with parents and principals. It is structural.
Over the past several years, a growing number of selective colleges have adopted test-optional admissions policies, dropping the SAT and ACT from their evaluation criteria. It has had a significant downstream consequence: the high school GPA became the dominant quantitative measure in a college application. Every K-12 teacher in America implicitly understands this. An honest B+ in a rigorous course might accurately reflect what a student knows. It might also be the grade that keeps that student out of their first-choice school.
The same dynamic plays out at the state level. Several states tie college scholarship eligibility primarily to GPA. Florida’s Bright Futures program and Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship both use GPA thresholds as the primary gateway to state-funded financial aid. When a student’s scholarship money is on the line, the pressure on teachers to keep grades above a certain threshold is overwhelming.
Then there are the grading policies themselves. During and after COVID, districts across the country adopted a set of practices marketed as “grading for equity.” These included grade floors — policies that guaranteed students a minimum score of 50 out of 100, even for work never submitted —, unlimited exam retakes, and the elimination of credit for homework and class participation. The stated goal was to remove bias from grading. The practical effect was to sever the already weakening connection between grades and mastery.
The result is a system where inflation is rational at every level. Teachers inflate preemptively to avoid conflict. Administrators back down when conflict arrives. Schools operate within a postsecondary admissions process that has placed GPA at its center. At no point does anyone in the system benefit from maintaining rigorous standards, and at every point, there is a tangible cost for doing so.
It is a textbook collective action problem. Each actor in the K-12 system, acting rationally within their own constraints, contributes to an outcome that harms students, misleads parents, and degrades the value of an education for everyone.
Parents Just Don’t Understand
Grade inflation would be less damaging if parents knew grades are an unreliable indicator of their child’s academic performance.
They don’t.
A 2023 study by Gallup and Learning Heroes surveyed nearly 2,000 parents of K-12 public school students and found that 79 percent report their child is receiving mostly B’s or better. Almost nine in ten believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math. These numbers are wildly out of step with reality. On the 2022 NAEP, only 33 percent of fourth graders scored proficient or above in reading. Only 36 percent did so in math. Among 12th graders taking the ACT, just 40 percent met college readiness benchmarks in reading and 30 percent met them in math.
Parents are not stupid. They are misinformed. The Gallup-Learning Heroes study found that 64 percent of parents rely on report cards as one of their top three sources of information about their child’s academic progress. Only 21 percent said the same about year-end state standardized test results. When your primary source of information is telling you everything is fine, you have no reason to act.
This matters because parents do act when they know there is a problem. A 2026 working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute by Derek Rury and Ariel Kalil studied how parents weigh grades against standardized test scores when making decisions about investing in their child’s education — in tutoring, for example. Using over 23,000 investment decisions from more than 2,000 parents, they found that parents respond to both signals, but place significantly more weight on grades. When grades are low, parents invest, regardless of what the test score says. When grades are high, but test scores are low, parents do not invest. The high grade crowds out the response that the low test score would otherwise trigger.
That finding is the mechanism through which grade inflation does its real damage. It is not just that the signal is wrong. It is that the wrong signal actively suppresses the corrective action parents would take if they had accurate information.
A child who is struggling in math but receiving a B will not get a tutor. Their parents will not schedule a meeting with the teacher. They will not look for supplemental programs. The inflated grade has told them there is no problem.
Why Parents Don’t Trust the One Signal That Could Help
The question, then, is why parents discount the one signal that could cut through the noise. Standardized test scores are designed precisely for this purpose — to provide an objective measure of what a student actually knows. Two factors explain why they fail to serve that function.
The first is a sustained public relations campaign against testing. Teachers unions and allied advocacy groups have spent years framing standardized tests as reductive, biased, and harmful. The language is familiar: “teaching to the test,” “reducing kids to a number,” “high-stakes testing.” This messaging has been effective. The Rury and Kalil study found that nearly 40 percent of parents believe standardized tests are biased against certain groups. When asked directly, 71 percent of parents said grades are more important than test scores for making decisions about their own children. Only 8.5 percent said the opposite.
The second is timing. Standardized test scores typically arrive months after the test is administered — sometimes over the summer, sometimes well into the following school year. By the time a parent sees the result, it is stale. Compare that to a report card, which arrives every quarter. Parents understandably weigh the signal that shows up when there is still time to do something about it, even if that signal is unreliable.
This combination is deeply damaging. Parents are left with one signal that is timely but dishonest, and another that is honest but delayed, and culturally discredited. The natural self-correcting mechanism — parents investing in their children when they see them struggling — has been broken by the very system that is supposed to be providing honest information.
The Costs of Grade Inflation
The costs of this broken feedback loop are not abstract.
A recent study by Jeff Denning and colleagues linked high school administrative data from Los Angeles and Maryland to postsecondary and earnings records to measure the long-run impact of grade inflation on students. They found that being assigned to a teacher with higher average grade inflation reduces a student’s future test scores, lowers the likelihood of graduating from high school, decreases college enrollment, and ultimately reduces earnings. The cumulative effect is large: a teacher with one standard deviation higher than average grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of their collective students’ lifetime earnings by $213,872.
That number is worth sitting with. Grade inflation is not a victimless accounting trick. It lowers college attendance. It reduces lifetime earnings. It makes our students less prepared and, collectively, our workforce less capable.
When a country systematically tells its students they are performing well when they are not, it produces a generation that is less prepared than the one before it. This is not hypothetical. NAEP scores in reading and math have declined over the past decade even as average GPAs have risen. The share of high school students graduating with an A average has increased significantly since the early 2000s, but the share demonstrating proficiency on national assessments has not kept pace. We are handing out more A’s for less learning. The downstream consequences — a less literate workforce, fewer students prepared for rigorous postsecondary programs, lower productivity — are diffuse enough that no single institution is held accountable, but real enough that we will feel them for decades.
Grade inflation is, in this sense, a form of national self-deception. It flatters us in the short run and diminishes us in the long run. Unlike other forms of educational failure, it is almost perfectly designed to go unnoticed — because the very mechanism that would alert us to the problem, the grade itself, is the thing that has been corrupted.
There’s one more issue with grade inflation: it doesn’t stay contained. It spreads to adjacent systems, including the ones that are supposed to serve as external checks on grade inflation itself.
Consider what just happened in Massachusetts. On March 3, Governor Maura Healey celebrated that 35.8 percent of Massachusetts public high school graduates scored a 3 or higher on an AP exam — the highest percentage in the nation and the highest on record. State officials touted it as evidence that students are better prepared than ever. What they did not mention is that the College Board has changed how it scores AP exams. Passing rates have surged nationally in recent years not because students are learning more, but because the exams have gotten easier. The number of correct answers needed for passing scores has been reduced. The College Board confirmed the changes but neither the organization nor Massachusetts officials noted them in their press releases.
This is grade inflation’s downstream logic applied to a different institution. The AP exam was designed to be an objective, nationally comparable measure of college-level mastery. It was supposed to be the kind of signal that could not be gamed by local grading practices. But the same incentive structure that inflates classroom grades has reached the College Board. Students and families are happier because they get college credit. Schools are happier because they look good. Governors get to hold press conferences.
When the checks on grade inflation are themselves inflated, the system has no remaining mechanism for self-correction. That is why legislative action is necessary.
What States Can Do
There are three things states can do right now to help curb grade inflation.
End test-optional college admissions at public universities.
The shift to test-optional admissions is wrong-headed for a number of reasons, as I’ve written before.
But it also did something else: it removed the one external check that kept grade inflation from being costless. When standardized test scores were part of the admissions equation, a school that handed out inflated A’s would eventually be exposed by mediocre SAT or ACT results. Test-optional policies eliminated that accountability mechanism. States that control their public university systems can restore it. Requiring standardized test scores for admission to state universities would not solve grade inflation overnight, but it would reintroduce a signal that schools cannot manipulate.
The tide is already turning. Over the past two years, a growing number of universities have reversed their test-optional policies after reviewing admissions data from the pandemic era. Every Ivy League school except Columbia has reinstated a testing requirement. MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania all now require scores. Ohio State reinstated its requirement after finding that students who submitted test scores had higher GPAs and were more likely to persist through their degree. The University System of Georgia restored testing requirements at four additional campuses. Princeton’s decision followed a five-year internal review that found academic performance was stronger among students who had submitted scores. University officials starting to take data seriously is beginning to reverse these disastrous, ideologically motivated changes. Universities looked at what happened when they removed the external signal and concluded that grades alone were not sufficient to predict whether a student was prepared. State legislators overseeing public university systems should reach the same conclusion.
Get test scores back to parents faster — and make them harder to ignore.
Rury and Kalil make clear that parents will act on negative academic information — but only if they receive it in an accessible form and at a time when action is still possible. Right now, standardized test results often arrive months after the test is administered. A parent who receives their child’s state assessment results over the summer or halfway into the following school year has no actionable moment. The information is stale before it arrives. Report cards, by contrast, show up every quarter. They are immediate and familiar. It is no surprise that parents weigh them more heavily, even when they are unreliable.
Virginia is showing what a better approach looks like. In 2025, the General Assembly passed House Bill 1957, a comprehensive overhaul of the state’s Standards of Learning assessment system that takes effect in the 2026–27 school year. The law requires schools to provide score reports to families within 45 days — a significant improvement over the months-long delays that are common in most states. Those reports will include not just the student’s individual performance, but a comparison to the performance of other students in the school, the school division, and the state. Scores will be reported on a 100-point scale, replacing the old system that produced numbers like 487 that meant nothing to most parents.
Most consequentially, Virginia will require that SOL scores count for 10 percent of a student’s final course grade, starting with seventh graders. That provision is worth paying attention to. It does not replace grades with test scores. It forces the two signals onto the same report card. A parent who sees an A in math alongside a 43 on the state assessment will have a much harder time ignoring the discrepancy than a parent who receives those two pieces of information months apart, in different formats, from different sources. It is a transparency mechanism embedded directly in the grade itself.
Other states should look at Virginia’s model closely. Faster turnaround on state assessment results, clearer and more usable score reports, and structural linkages between test performance and course grades would give parents a timely, objective benchmark to look at alongside the report card. The goal is not to replace grades, but to ensure that parents have access to at least one signal that grade inflation cannot corrupt, delivered at a time when it can still change behavior.
Make grades honest.
Improving the delivery of test scores to parents is a worthwhile reform. But it is important to be clear-eyed about its limitations. If the goal is to ensure that parents have accurate information about their child’s academic performance, the most direct path is not to make parents care more about test scores. It is to make grades honest.
Rury and Kalil demonstrate why. When grades are high, parents do not invest — regardless of what the test score says.
The grade is the dominant signal. It has been the dominant signal for decades, and no amount of redesigned parent reports or 45-day turnaround mandates is likely to significantly change that. 71 percent of parents say grades matter more than test scores when making decisions about their own children. That preference is deeply ingrained, reinforced by frequency and familiarity, and actively defended by institutions that benefit from the status quo. Trying to get parents to weigh test scores more heavily means fighting an uphill battle against culture and a well-funded opposition that has spent years telling parents not to trust tests.
Fixing the grade itself is a different proposition. If grades reflect actual mastery — if a B means a student has demonstrated competence and an A means they have demonstrated excellence — then parents do not need to cross-reference two conflicting signals and decide which one to believe. They can do what they have always done: look at the report card. The difference is that the report card would be telling the truth.
This is why direct legislative action on grading practices should be the priority.
South Carolina is showing what that looks like. In 2025, Senator Jeff Zell — a former Sumter County school board member who had fought to end his district’s policy of guaranteeing students a minimum score of 50, even for work never submitted — filed S. 537 after the new board considered bringing the policy back. His bill was straightforward: prohibit school districts from requiring teachers to assign a minimum grade that exceeds a student’s actual performance.
Rep. Fawn Pedalino took the concept further. Her bill, H. 5073, goes beyond banning grade floors. It requires that only academic performance be considered in assigning high school course grades. It mandates that students complete all required assignments before becoming eligible for credit or content recovery programs — a direct response to the practice of students blowing off a class and coasting through a makeup course. It prohibits districts from counting benchmark assessments in final grades when the content has not yet been taught. It directs the State Board of Education to convene a task force to overhaul the state’s Uniform Grading Policy. Lastly, it enforces compliance by withholding 10 percent of a district’s State Aid to Classroom funding for violations.
H. 5073 passed the South Carolina House 110 to 2. That margin is worth noting. When the issue is framed correctly — that this is about making grades mean something again, not about punishing students — the politics are overwhelmingly favorable.
The South Carolina model is instructive because it addresses grade inflation at its roots without telling individual teachers how to grade. It removes the structural policies — grade floors, no-consequences credit recovery, benchmark tests counted as final grades — that make inflation the default.
Other states should follow.
The students I taught at Governors State were not lazy. They were not unintelligent. They had been told, semester after semester, that their work was good enough — and they had no reason to doubt it. When I handed back grades that reflected what their writing actually demonstrated, they were not just disappointed. They were confused. The system had failed them long before I entered the picture.
That is what grade inflation does. It does not help students. It lies to them. It tells them they are prepared when they are not. It tells their parents everything is fine when it is not. It suppresses the very interventions that would address the problem if anyone knew the problem existed.
Teachers are not the villains of this story. They are trapped in a system that punishes honesty and rewards the path of least resistance. Parents are not the villains either. They are making rational decisions based on information they have every reason to trust. The problem is structural. It is a collective action failure in which every individual actor behaves rationally and the outcome is worse for everyone.
Collective action failures require collective solutions, and our states have the tools.
They can ban grade floors and tighten credit recovery requirements, as South Carolina is doing. They can force test scores onto the report card and get results to parents in weeks instead of months, as Virginia is doing. They can end test-optional admissions policies at public universities to restore an external check the system desperately needs.
None of this will be easy. The incentives that created grade inflation are powerful, and the constituencies that benefit from the status quo are large. But the costs of inaction are no longer abstract. They show up in declining college completion rates, in reduced lifetime earnings, in a workforce that is less capable than it should be, and in a generation of students who were told they were ready and found out too late that they were not.
The students at Governors State deserved honest information about where they stood. So does every student and every parent of a student sitting in a K-12 classroom. The question is whether we are willing to build a system that provides it.
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