Why Grade Inflation is Bad Teaching

To teach is to help someone do something he could not do before. By definition, then, the student comes in unable to perform well at the tasks being taught. In order to help him improve, the teacher needs to give him frequent, accurate feedback on where he stands relative to the goal.

That's why grade inflation is such terrible teaching. If I, as a teacher, tell my student that she is doing very well at a task when she is not, in fact, doing very well at the task I may make her feel better in the short term, I may ingratiate myself to her, and I may reduce conflict between her (and her family) and me, but I have failed in my essential function as a professional.

Once again, college admission offices can help secondary school teachers in this regard by choosing mot to reward students with GPA's of 120 on a 100-point scale over those with lower averages. They can make clear that rigor is more important than scores.

No matter what colleges do, though -- and colleges will never act with the interests of high school student at the top of their priorities -- secondary teachers need to buck up and hold their students to the highest standards possible.

I went into teaching, in part, with this objective in mind. I went to a public high school in a fairly wealthy Connecticut town. My graduating class was a bit larger than Millbrook School as a whole – so, we’re talking a middle sized public school.

All the classes there were “tracked;” Level One was considered honors, Level Two was college bound, Level Three was remedial.  For two years, I skated. I did as little work as possible, considered my teachers to be foolish or incompetent or both (and in retrospect I think I was right a lot of the time) and thought much more about how I fit in than what I should be doing myself. When I was a junior, though, I started to take myself a little more seriously, and invested more of my energy in school work. I did well, especially in history and English, and most of my classmates were pretty serious students.

In fact, most of the people who graduated in the top 20 in our class went to the most competitive colleges, many of them Ivies. I remember my US History class, in particular, being very demanding and very engaging. The kids were more talented than I was, and I had to work hard to keep up.

But in my senior year, in addition to the full-year European history class, I requested to take other history courses – what were called electives. These were all Level Two courses, and Level One students usually did not go into them, but I asked to do it, and got in to two or three.  When I arrived, I was shocked. These courses were holding bins, waiting rooms for kids ready to go home. I could do next to no work and get the highest possible grades. Kids literally could sit around throwing spit balls. The homework consisted of copying definitions into a notebook and turning the notebook in. Tests were even easier than that, and there was no writing at all.

I went into teaching because I never wanted that to happen to anyone if I could help it. It made me angry, and still does. People should never be ignored or condescended to, and the failure to challenge a student is both neglectful and condescending. My mistakes as a teacher, then, tend to go the other way, and that’s why.