Beware of Grade Inflation As College Nears
- davd soul
- a few seconds ago
- 2 min read
Letter to Ephesians: Don’t weep, get angry “your child’s 4.0 GPA probably isn’t real” as the January deadlines for college entrance applications near. Standardized tests show only 22-35% of 12th graders can handle the “3-Rs” so the 78%ers might think community college vs Columbia…
That’s the gist of the Fox op ed by David Blogbaum, who owns a tutoring company and shared this reality check: As “college application deadlines approach … students & especially parents are having tough conversations & revising their school lists & expectations in one direction: downward. Ninety percent of parents believe that their children are at or above grade level proficiency, yet, according to standardized measures, 12th-grade students have the lowest math & reading preparedness on record.” Blobaum says most families realize too late that their “scholar” son or daughter has been doled out inflated grades by their schoolteachers. He cites a scenario he’s seen “countless” times: “My kid just got her SAT score back and it is much lower than we expected. She is a top performer at her school but scored in the 1100s.”
Blobaum concludes, those SAT & ACT scores are a “rude awakening to parents & kids who have been “misled” about their real academic preparedness & the news is “too late” to overcome. University of California at San Diego, e.g., notes 25% of its incoming students don’t know how to do middle shool math while boasting perfect 4.0 GPAs in their HS math classes. Worse, says Blobaum, “there is no easy way to now deflate grades” because to do so suddenly would “disadvantage students with lower grades than those of other applicants.” The entire mess means the disadvantaged kids would not only lose a chance to get into a top tier college but qualify for student aid/scholarships, both of which are usually tied to those SAT & ACT scores. Short of carefully thought-out reforms to the college entrance system that would somehow take grade inflation into account & measure other indices of future achievement, wouldn’t monitoring a kid’s real academic progress earlier, say by Junior year, be the smart parental move?
Davd Soul
