At the college level, Wellesley and other schools moved away from grade inflation years ago and did not see a drop in grad school admissions. If high schools are willing to do this, they should expect similar results.
Interesting as I don’t remember ever hearing of Wellesley ever having grade inflation.
Heard quite the opposite considering it’s longstanding academic rigor rep is closer to schools with exceedingly high academic rigor/workload like Swat, Reed, UChicago, JHU, Cornell, etc.
I once counted and fully 2/3 of my son’s class was on the honor roll, which required a minimum of 3.5 with no grade lower than C.
When I was in HS, the honor roll consisted of the top 100 students IN THE SCHOOL, which had about 5000 students total. I made it every semester I was there and my average was only about a 92 because I stank in math.
Sounds like your son’s HS class is likely to regard the honor roll in the same way military enlistee/conscripts regarded the “Good Conduct” medal* or how most Harvard alum friends who graduated in the mid-00s and earlier regarded graduating with honors…especially lowest level honors considering some classes such as Jared Kushner’s had up to 90% of their graduates graduating with honors before Harvard reformed the system for awarding honors.
- It is exclusively awarded to enlistees who have kept themselves out of serious disciplinary trouble for 3 years during their enlistment. According to older neighbors, only screwups who get embroiled in serious disciplinary breaches or those with a criminal bent end up not getting those medals during their time in the service.
Also, they’re never awarded to commissioned officers during their commissioned service as it is presumed by virtue of their commission that they will adhere to “good conduct” unless proven otherwise. Being held to higher standards and all that.
My daughter was around 50rh of 700 students with a lot of B’s. She took 10 AP tests and got 5 fives. In classes where she got Bs. So grade inflation doesn’t seem to be happening.
Prestigious schools don’t inflate grades because the majority of the kids take 10-15 AP courses during HS that require standard AP tests. Last year one of the Ivy League’s dean of admissions visited my daughter’s school, and he said that when they see an A+ in an AP course but the student got a 2 or 3 on the AP test, they know that the A+ isn’t really an A+. That is how schools build prestige and good reputation among admissions officers, and that is why only a few schools send many students to the tops schools and others few or none. There is no way to trick them by inflating grades.
Part of the reason we allowed our son to go to boarding school was to avoid the all-As and AP rat race of our local schools. His boarding school has zero grade inflation but is well known by all colleges. No student is harmed by earning an uninflated GPA or taking no AP courses (the school discourages them and is eliminating them from the curriculum). The entire class does well at college time, and most report that college is a breeze after the rigor of boarding school.
We got so tired of seeing perfect report cards in elementary and middle school for what we could easily see was imperfect work. More than once I re-corrected an assignment and sent it back, yet we lived in the “best” school district in our state. Grade inflation is such a disservice to students, especially when standardized test scores don’t corroborate. By that time, however, it’s usually too late to remediate and whatever colleges these abused kids get into will often pose an academic struggle on top of the hit to their self-esteem.
That was my point, @cobrat .Wellesley does not have grade inflation anymore. But like virtually every other school of its caliber, it did have a problem with grade creep until changing its grading policy years ago.
Grade inflation is strongly linked to students’ choice of majors. This is one of the best articles on the subject I have seen:
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2011/11/grade-inflation-and-choice-of-major.html
I have wondered about this. Our high school grades hard. No curves, no extra credit, no credit for late homework, etc. My older D has a much higher GPA in college than she had in high school.
Now my younger son just finished his sophomore year of high school and has just slightly over a 3.0. This puts him in the top half of the class. Yet I look at colleges, and even schools with 90% acceptance rates and average ACT in the low 20’s are reporting averages of 3.6 among their freshman class. It’s making it hard to come up with a target list for him. GPA is useless as a screening tool because it seems it’s so much easier to get As at other high schools.
Does your school have Naviance? You might learn that the colleges that take kids with a 3.6 from the HS down the street takes kids with a 3.0 from your HS.
Top half of the class is top half of the class. That’s what colleges want to know.
It really doesn’t matter if top half equals 3.0 or 3.5. Colleges are quite good at figuring this out, even without official class ranks.
The amp actually does not get any louder just because the knob goes up to eleven (rather than 10).
Bit at UC and particularly at Cal Poly gpa is very important. I think this hurts kids at our high school where only a very few kids have unweighted 4.0 while other schools have 40 or 50.
My son had a 3.46 GPA and was fully in the bottom 20% of his class.
That is serious grade inflation going on at your S’s HS.
Even at my public magnet full of genuine genius types or presumably BxSci…I’d very much doubt a student with a 3.46 would be in the bottom 20%. More like top 25%-35% or somewhere thereabouts.
@cobrat -
The little secret of my kids’ school is that the highest GPA possible is close to a 5.5 (+1 for all honors and AP classes and our SD gives A+'s) but the guidance department reports grades on a 4.0 scale. So there are kids in our HS with GPA’s of over 5.0.
i might have been a little off. It seems that my son is probably in the bottom 40%ile, not the 20th, and certainly not the top quarter or third. I checked the district website and for the class of 2016 (this year’s numbers aren’t out yet), 22.2% of the class had GPA’s below 2.9, so I misspoke because my son wasn’t in the bottom 20%. 59.4% of the class had GPA’s of 3.5 and up, including 12.8% whose GPA’s were above 4.5. 17.4% were in my son’s category of 3.0 to 3.49; I assume that since he had a 3.46, he was closer to the top point of that 17.4. Regardless, I think this is clear evidence of rampant grade inflation. How does almost 60% of a graduating class have 3.5 or better GPA’s? My town must be Lake Woebegone.
I attended but did not graduate from Bronx Science in the early 70’s and there was no grade inflation. I worked darned hard for the 90’s I earned in algibberish and honors English but breezed to a 100 in social studies because I loved the subject and I think my teacher was shocked to have a pupil who actually found value in his teaching. I left the school because I wanted to be in a school where people who did better in history than math weren’t thought of as being stupid. I think I would have been happier at Stuy but my parents wouldn’t allow me to take the test.
Speaking as someone who attended in the early-mid '90s, I don’t think Stuy would have been very different in that respect. I’m thinking you’d have likely hated it there too if that was your reason for leaving BxSci.
Only possible difference is if one was lopsided heavily in math/STEM to the point of being heavily deficient in humanities/social sciences…they’d also be considered stupid by many in the top third of my graduating class as there was an expectation one excelled in everything…and there were plenty of classmates who did.
From comparing notes with friends/colleagues who graduated from BxSci…it doesn’t seem like their campus culture or academic rigor was very different from Stuy’s…even though most Stuy grads will be loath to admit it.
While I wouldn’t say I enjoyed my HS experience…I did feel the need to stick it out to graduation to prove to myself I can and to stick it to a few teachers and many classmates who’d like nothing better than to see me leave in defeat. And I took some satisfaction in seeing their disappointed faces when I actually graduated. 
This doesn’t stop in high school. The conference my daughter plays in has an honor roll for students with a 3.2 or higher. Daughter’s team had 11 of the 22 kids on the list, including 4 of the engineers. Respectable, as the school is 80% STEM.
Another school in the conference had 33 of 36 players on the list. Lake Wobegon U, where everyone above average
Keep in mind that engineering majors tend to not only not have grade inflation, but also may experience grade deflation.
In that context, a 3.2 cumulative GPA would be above the average. Especially considering I know in some respectable/elite engineering programs, a 2.8 cumulative average in engineering would place that student well into the top third of his/her class.
@cobrat -
I didn’t care what anyone thought. When I graduated from 8th grade at an Orthodox yeshiva, my choices were Science or an all girls’ religious HS. I wasn’t permitted to consider attending the local HS, which was actually very highly ranked in those days. With those options, I chose Science because I would be allowed to wear pants to school and because there would be boys there. Once I decided I wanted to leave Science, I began a very carefully planned course of action which involved crying a lot and threatening to kill myself, something I had absolutely no intent of doing but I was 13, along with throwing my math books at the wall. My situation was probably worse than it had to be due to my being a good test taker. When I entered 9th grade, I was placed in an honors geometry class and a high level physics class. I had skipped 5th grade and wasn’t prepared for the math involved. I think I would have been okay had I been placed into regular algebra and 9th grade intro to survey science and I would have stayed. When they went in to discuss my transfer, my parents were told that I tested in the top 25 of the 3000 kids who took the test that year and that all 25 of those kids were put into that physics class. The next 25 were placed in an advanced bio class. I am not certain that I believe this - I believe my parents were told that, but I think it might have been just to convince them not to let me leave, except that there really was a physics and a bio class for 50 kids and everyone else took regular science. The whole experience did a number on me. I became convinced that I was a moron in math when in reality what probably happened is that I had a gap in my education due to skipping since at the school I went to, the pre-geometry concepts like area, perimeter, etc. were taught in 5th grade and I had to play catch up because I just never learned them. Had I gone to public school, I probably would have been in the 2 year SP and would have learned the math basics I missed. It took until I had my own children before I realized what skipping had meant for me in terms of my math learning. I was skipped by the school in exchange for my parents agreeing not to let me take the test for Hunter College HS, which was still all girls then.