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Grade Inflation Making It Tough To Evaluate Students' Performance

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 14, 2008

It used to be that a 4.0 grade-point average was considered a perfect "A," but the numbers posted by some recent Hillsborough high school graduates have been positively stratospheric - including the county's top GPA of 8.68 earned by a student at King High School who was this year's numbers leader.

Who knew there was even such a thing as being more than doubly perfect?

The kids who post these big numbers are indeed dedicated students who spent their high school years amassing good grades in Advanced Placement courses and taking more classes than they need to graduate. They hit those big numbers because the district rewards bonus points on top of the GPA for every Advanced Placement and honors course.

But the same system that fuels these super-high GPAs also makes average students look better than they actually are.

And Hillsborough's academic largesse also can be found in other measures of high school success.

Some honors courses once considered a mark of academic success now enroll students who don't read or write at grade level. And regular courses these days - well, those used to be called "remedial."

Even the scoring of the district's semester exams has been reconfigured to a new scale that boosts grades. On some particularly tough tests, like physics exams, a student need only score 62 percent of the questions correct to earn an "A."
School officials defend their system saying they want to encourage students to challenge themselves to higher-level work. And in the case of semester exams, they wanted to ensure uniform grading - albeit with a more generous scale for at least some exams.

Well enough, but in the process they've created a system that muddies the public's tried-and-true yardsticks of what constitutes academic success.

In an era when honors and AP courses become the norm - teachers now joke AP stands for "any person" - adding big grade bonuses is overkill.

Other school districts take a more moderate approach, grading AP courses on a five-point scale so that a "B" in a college-level course equates to an "A" in a regular course. But they don't allow students to boost their GPAs by the large measures that Hillsborough does.

For the academic superstars at the top of their class, it doesn't matter what sort of system the schools devise. These kids will excel because of their motivation and work ethic. Colleges and Florida's Bright Futures scholarship program have their own grade calculations, rendering the district's GPA calculations moot on those fronts.

But for the vast swath of students in the middle, the scoring systems do make a difference when it comes to the public being able to evaluate academic achievement in public high schools, or even their own child.

The district is pushing more and more students into honors courses and Advanced Placement courses whether they are academically suited for the work or not, all in the name of rigor.

Some teachers say they've had to adjust their curriculum to adapt to these lower-performing students - rather than let them flounder - so an honors course in some instances isn't as rigorous as it used to be.

Yet the grading system remains generous.

As one Chamberlain High School student recently put it: "In our class, anything under a 5.0 is considered mediocre to sucky." And here we thought a 5.0 was better than perfect.

The district would provide considerable more transparency and accountability if it ceased monkeying with the labels and scoring systems and simply made high school courses appropriately hard and fair.

Schools should give extra credit to students who push themselves the extra mile, but there's no need to pile it on so thick.

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