Grade Inflation In Education

Grade inflation is a major problem that keeps reoccurring in Universities across the nation. Grade inflation is defined as the awarding of higher grades than students deserve to maintain a school’s academic reputation. A change needs to be implemented to this unfair and wrong act because too many colleges are getting away with this form of cheating. Universities must install grade quotas because grade inflation causes an un-balanced playing field for graduate school applications, hides laziness on the part of student’s academic work, and forces teachers to cheat student education in order to maintain good reviews.

One of the most concerning issues in relation to grade inflation is the un-balanced playing field for graduate school applications.

A student with inflated grades may earn the same acceptance to graduate school as a student who has worked very hard. Sita Slavov a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute states “without grade inflation, a truly outstanding student might be awarded an A, while a very good student might receive a B+. With grade inflation, both students receive as, making it hard for employers and graduate schools to differentiate them (Slavov).” Graduate schools have limited acceptance rates and the issue of having to differentiate between two students who have similar grade point averages even though one might be a much better student isn’t fair. The student who puts in the most amount of time and effort towards there academic work should get the acceptance, but that is not always the case anymore due to grade inflation. The playing field is now very un-balanced due to the fact that a student who stands head-and-shoulder above a peer in there class receives the same grade as a mediocre student. This does a huge disservice to a student who is truly exceptional.
Another issue grade inflation impacts are the larger emphasis on standardized testing. Angeloa Massola a student at Wesleyan says in her article about grade inflation “small differentials in grade point averages make it very difficult for future graduate programs to select candidates. This result in a larger emphasis on standardized tests, which most students hate and feel is not representative (Massola).” This is a problem because although a hard working student with a high grade point average, might not do well on standardized tests. These tests are not an accurate depiction of the quality of education a student has received. The outlying issue here is that without grade inflation universities would weigh grade point averages more because there wouldn’t be as much small differentials in them between students. But with grade inflation standardized testing scores is becoming more a factor to graduate school acceptance