Grade inflation is a scourge that must be eradicated

A few years ago, I penned an op-ed in this space about grade inflation. Unfortunately, the problem has gotten noticeably worse, as highlighted by the Review-Journal in its Nov. 12 editorial, “Deceiving students, parents and communities.”

The pandemic gave many colleges and universities cover to drop SAT and/or ACT scores as an admission requirement. As many of us predicted, the results on campus were disastrous. Institutions of higher learning had to offer many more remedial courses, and professors found themselves unable to teach college-level material to utterly unprepared students. The editorial noted that 25 percent of students in a recent incoming class at UC-San Diego got a second-grade-level math question wrong.

To their credit, many universities have reinstituted the testing requirement for admission (or have announced that they will in the near future). Whether people want to admit it or not, the SAT and the ACT do test skills and knowledge. If you don’t know what a full sentence is, it’s hard to get a grammar question correct. If you don’t know how to find a percentage, it will be difficult to get a good math score. If you don’t understand what you’re reading, life is going to be much harder.

I first noticed this issue more than 20 years ago when I was working as a math teacher at a co-ed boarding school in New York. My students were telling me that one of my colleagues was giving his students 50-point bonus questions about “The Simpsons.” I refused to do this, insisting instead that they learn the material and do the homework. At the end of the year, you can guess whose students had no problem with the state exam (which was deemed “so difficult” that it had to be “curved”).

I know of many teachers in the Las Vegas Valley and elsewhere literally selling grades for the price of a box of tissues. (It’s “extra credit” to bring one in for the class to use, you know.) One student here told me that she got an A in geometry because her teacher stood over her and told her what to write on the test. A high-school math teacher in New York has proudly posted on Facebook that she has offered bonus points on a graded assessment to students who answered such questions as, “What is your math teacher going to do this weekend?” and, “What is your favorite class?”

This is not an indictment of all teachers. We all know that a great many teachers do great work, just as we all know that far fewer than 99 percent of all teachers are “effective” or “highly effective.” But it is imperative for the community — parents, all of the good-to-great teachers, administrators, union officials, etc. — to put a stop to this and insist that grades reflect mastery of material. For too long, they simply have not.

Too frequently, I have had to explain exactly this to parents who have entrusted me to help their students prepare for the SAT and/or the ACT: Just because your child has an A in math in no way means that he or she knows (or ever knew) the material. As you might imagine, they are quite shocked to find out that their high school junior has no idea how to deal with percents, cannot find an average and cannot accurately read a bar graph or a table of data.

Nevada students have an average ACT score of 17. On most scoring tables, students who get just half of the questions correct — which is still an F, mind you — and randomly guess on everything else will get a score at least 5 points higher than that. Much the same goes for the SAT.

Nevada’s students can and should be better than that. In my career, I have worked with more than 2,000 students, many of whom were scoring well below average and worked to improve significantly. Like anything worth achieving, this will take some time and effort.

Parents can start by teaching their kids that tests are nothing to be scared of. If you’ve done the work (and didn’t just look up answers online or let AI do the work for you), tests are simply opportunities to show how much you’ve learned, and it probably isn’t the test’s fault that you didn’t score what you were hoping to score. Re-tests should be a thing of the past. Students (especially older ones) will just memorize answers to boost their grade, which doesn’t show real learning. Teachers and administrators need to hold firm to appropriate academic and behavioral standards for the good of everyone in class. Teachers additionally need to know that administrators won’t pressure them to change or inflate grades, and administrators need to back up their teachers when appropriate grades are entered.

Outside of school, parents need to impress upon students the need to take control of their lives and bring their skills up to par. There are many low-cost (or even free) online options for this. Surely, many children have extra challenges, but that in no way means that they are incapable of learning.

We all want our children to succeed. Setting them up for future failure by making it appear as if they know way more than they do could not be more counterproductive.

Mike Obstgarten is president of MostPrep, a Las Vegas based college test prep company.