Speaking as a public school educator, I really appreciate how your analysis digs into how this grade inflation is failing the kids (who are often blamed for it). I also want to make sure we are not blaming the high school teachers here- which I don’t think you do - but it’s worth spelling out the various forces driving this phenomena outside a teachers’ control:
1) Rigid and punitive school evaluation systems at the district level incentivize schools to juke their stats (accountability is good, but may district admins are mini-tyrants)
2) The huge and well funded expansion of AP-for-All, which pushes more kids into ‘college level’ classes sooner (I now routinely see kids from charters who are taking AP classes in 7th grade - huh???)
3) College admissions becoming more cutthroat and time intensive each year, driving student and parent intolerance for low grades
4) The youth mental health crisis, which has left many young people fragile and makes schools warier of giving low grades
It’s sad because AP for All is really a response to the long, sad history of how tracking has failed students. But rather than fix the root problem - that schools often had low or no expectations for students in low tracked classes - we’ve instead just fixed the optics and are serving all student less well.
I’m not sure how we get out of this given how deeply entangled all these factors are.
I think the impetus for change will likely come from the university level. They will realize they are getting unprepared students who aren't able to actually succeed at the professional level that universities rely on (for prestige, for rankings, for donations) and they'll change how they evaluate students which will cascade down to shifts in K-12 behavior, and student/parent incentives.
I was a university professor. I'm afraid that the situation isn't playing out as you and I would hope.
Universities are indeed changing the ways in which they evaluate students. They've been doing it gradually for many years—by inflating grades—and now they are turning to other methods as well. Consider the move in undergraduate and graduate programs toward "contract grading," which often amounts to grading students by the proportion of assignments completed, rather than by the quality of their work.
> [Universities] will realize they are getting unprepared students who aren't able to actually succeed at the professional level that universities rely on (for prestige, for rankings, for donations)
They may realize it, but what incentive will they have to do anything about it?
You mention prestige and rankings. But take a look at the method behind the most influential rankings: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings. Graduation and retention rates, done up various ways, account for 42-47% of the scores that U.S. News and World Report uses to rank colleges. Post-grad outcomes account for only 10% of those scores. In short, the rankings incentivize the handing-out of degrees, but they don't incentivize colleges to care about students' post-graduation outcomes.
The contract grading is indeed a problem, which is often done in the name of equity. But adding fuel to the fire is the carry over from cancel culture of students who will complain to Deans for being called out on a bad essay or otherwise graded down. So some professors are grading less rigorously because they don't want to deal with any sort administrative conflict that could arise.
Jelani Nelson a professor at Berkeley in the EECS department has been on this for quite a while fighting back against watering down educational standards.
I think that is, sadly, unlikely. The faculty who actually teach have very little say in admissions and larger issues of policy; the UCSD report that has caused all this fuss was the product of several years of alarm-sounding at every level of faculty, from instructors to department chairs. What they got was...this report. That's it. If you read the latest utterances from Jim Rawlins at UCSD, his message is essentially "all UCSD students belong here and we are staying the course." Prestige as awarded by rankings won't play a role. The US News rankings of the UCs have gone up, not down, because US News and most other rankings calculate "selectivity" in terms of rejections. The UCs got many more apps by going test-blind, and thus produced more rejections, and instantly became "better" in terms of rankings. The UCs also gained in terms of yield by following these policies; by rejecting stronger students who likely had other good options, and offering admissions to thousands of less-prepared students who almost certainly did not have better options (because their applications didn't look so great when viewed through the holistic lens that other, non-UC institutions review applicants) UCSD bumped up its yield, too. In fact, the word "yield" is used conspicuously--several times--in the 53-page report. No, I don't think that the impetus for change will come from the university level. And since Trump's "corrections" are even more illiberal, short-sighted, and destructive than the UC's transgressions, it's hard to see how exactly this gets corrected, other than the slow groundswell of shame and commonsense that this article has, thankfully, helped to push along.
The University of California (UC) system is tax-funded and must allow equity of access. It continues to operate its Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) program, which guarantees admission to at least one UC campus for eligible California residents who rank in the top 9% of their high school graduating class (not 2%-3%, as that reflects an earlier iteration of the program before it expanded to 9% in 2012 to better align with the California Master Plan for Higher Education). This applies to students from participating public high schools across the state, provided they meet minimum UC admission requirements, such as completing 15 yearlong A-G courses (with at least 11 before their senior year) and maintaining a minimum 3.0 GPA in those courses during 10th and 11th grades. Teachers are pressure to ensure a C-grade to promising, capable students or those in each schools top 9%.
CA tax funded UCs are public colleges that must admit students from every CA public high school, not only those from certain zip codes, or those proficient in reading or math. Until all CA elementary schools are prioritized by CA’s Dept of Education and communities to ensure basics are mastered by third grade, forget improving outcomes later.
77% of CA college freshmen are not qualified, not prepared for college level work. However, CA needs college grads requiring moving students along. Some district 5th graders passed the CA high school exit exam which was DEI discontinued because majority of 12th grade high schoolers could not pass.
CA Diplomas are meaningless without standardized proctor testing under specific equatable testing conditions. Engineers have meaningful diplomas, plus a stamp to prove it.
I teach in a charter and am outside of your union complaint raised below but for about 5 years we've all been having equitable standards pushed down on us. Do nothing get a 50, grades structured in a way that precludes individual accountability for learning things.
Maybe me and the teachers around me are unrepresentative but put good curriculum in our hands and back us up when parents bitch about the grades and not create a Rube Goldberg machine of things you have to do because a student isn't doing their work seems like pretty straightforward prescription. Usually I've been overruled looking for more accountability.
Agreed. This mainly comes from administrative pressure on teachers. Should we fight back more? Sure, but then we look like the meanie in the department.
YUP!!! "Equitable" grading practices are a big part of the problem here. I fight tooth and nail against them in my building, but they are still pretty pervasive.
In blue states like New York the teachers' union wields vast power at the state and local levels. Their support can make or break a candidate (almost always a Democrat). If the union, as the collective voice of teachers, took a stand, it could not be ignored.
I would argue that unions are generally not the collective voices of who they represent but rather the most politically inclined segment of that population.
Got to remember most people are just trying to get by in the world and support their families.
Unfortunately, if a student comes into a class lacking the foundational skills (for whatever reason including moving from out of state), they usually won't get moved back to a level where they belong and the teacher will get blamed for their lack of progress. Ditto for students who need to be evaluated for learning disabilities but whose parents won't grant permission. The teacher is stuck teaching everyone the material that will be on the state test at the end of the year, even if some of the students would be better served by going back and learning the basics.
Thank you. Yes, it requires discipline at every grade not to advance a student who is not ready. That has to be supported by the state Ed Dept, school administration, and the unions. At the end of the day, you're doing the student a favor.
It's not just discipline unfortunately. There's structural and budget issues. Let's say you have a district with K-5 in one building and 6-8 in another. There's a student who is ready to move on to 6th grade except that they are at a 4th grade level in math. Clearly you don't want to keep them in the K-5 building, but there is no 4th grade math class offered in the 6-8 building and perhaps not enough students/teachers/classroom space to justify having one. The solution where I taught would be to offer remediation during a free period, but you are still giving the student the Math 6 exam at the end of the year. I think that's educational malpractice.
Also, it's great to have high standards and publish them, but the district doesn't have a lot of incentive to get a 6th grade student who is at 4th grade level in math up to a 5th grade level in math. Why? Because when all the stats come out, they are still going to show up as lacking proficiency as a 6th grader! There's every incentive for districts to invest in the edge cases and provide the most assistance for students whose progress will show up in the statistics. I am not making this up, I worked in such a district! It's how the sausage is made….
The pressure isn’t coming from unions. They mostly care about how teachers are treated, so if anything they would back a teacher’s right to fail a student.
Yes, teachers are often not incentivized to teach, or care if students learn. That is undoubtedly part of the problem. But they (metonymy for teachers' unions -and- teachers) also often strongly resist any attempts to incentivize effective teaching. Things like metrics, standardized testing, and observation are the only way to know if teachers are teaching effectively and provide feedback, and most teachers hate that shit and push back on it. They are absolutely not the innocent victims of admin.
You could argue that the union is representing the self-interest of teachers - and of course, that IS its purpose - and that the self-interest of the teachers does not necessarily share complete overlap with the interests of students. A teachers' union making unreasonable demands CAN be part of a functional system, it's just one that has to be offset by other forces. The administrations and local governments that negotiate with those teachers' unions have given in to the wrong demands.
As long as other stakeholders are just going to roll over and do what the teachers' unions wants (we might call it "the Chicago Model") then you're gonna get bad outcomes for everybody but the teachers. You shouldn't really expect any different. (If one were opposed to the idea of public sector unions generally it is a good point of attack, certainly.)
I dunno. The unions have played a role in this decline, no doubt. And the unions are controlled by the teachers, collectively. And the same mistakes in dealing with those unions have been made by hundreds of school districts. It's one of those things where it's kind of everybody's fault, which kind of makes it nobody's, right?
(Of course then you have outlier situations like the UC system dropping SAT requirements where you very much can point to the people who screwed up and hold them accountable.)
Sure. Plenty of teachers suck. Possibly a majority. I know not just because of my experience as a student, but because of what good teachers have told me.
Not a fan a teacher unions in the least, but in their defense, I do not see much reason to place blame on them here. Rather, look towards the same colleges that are now pissed off about student preparedness for college level work. The push for equitable outcomes at any cost comes from the ivory tower, not the teacher unions.
Teachers would be fine with metrics if they were fair: don’t expect a special ed teacher to have the same results as an AP teacher. But generally teachers, since the early 2000s, have been blamed for teaching in the “wrong” classroom or school. Meanwhile, students are accountable for nothing. At my school they leave after the last class whether they’re failing everything or getting all As.
Should teachers stay at school 24/7 to provide all this extra practice? Should we defy our superiors when they tell us to allow unlimited retakes of tests?
Thank you for your comment. Even though it was rhetorical, I would answer that in states with strong public teachers' unions, it can start with electing local union reps who will fight for better educational outcomes AND good contracts.
Yes, teachers are a part of the broken system - can’t disagree.
I certainly don’t see it that way as regards to unions. In my mind a huge root cause of the issue is that education as a sector lacks talent, which is because it is not possible to make a living wage as an educator in many states. Entrenched unions can create a different set of issues for sure, but a huge plus is that they ensure salary, benefits, and workers right protections that make it more possible for talented workers to choose the sector.
I don’t really see how unions contribute to grade inflation - if anything a strong union protects the right of a demanding teacher to hold a hard line on grades if they want to.
Pay in education is fine - the problem is that it’s almost all in extremely valuable benefits (large pensions and retirement at 55) and very little of it comes in salary, which is the absolute worst way to attract talented kids in their 20s into a field since no normal 18 year old chooses their college major based on retirement benefits. There is a reason no normal jobs pay like this.
Anecdotally too, it seems like working conditions for teachers have gotten worse, especially at public schools. Teachers feel like they’re increasingly pressured by both parents and administrators and have little recourse to push back against even the last reasonable members of those groups. I have multiple ex-teacher friends who have talked about this.
What constitutes “fine” is certainly up for debate, but here’s my view: something like 40% of ivy graduates are going into finance and consulting jobs, into jobs I’d argue majorly contribute nothing to society but are megabucks compensated starting with lucrative summer internships during college. Some of that top talent should be considering teaching and other jobs that do a social good.
Can you think of at least one really good teacher who helped you learn an absolute ton and grow as a person? Now what if we had a school system of those people? (Not to say those people must come from Ivy League schools, that’s certainly not true - I just think that speaks to how the incentive structure is all wrong.)
Retirement at 55?? 😂😂 I know literally zero teachers who have retired at 55. Every teacher I know who has retired has done so between 60-65, usually around 62-63.
Depends on the state I suppose - NY is 55 for full pension. To pick a random red state, Kansas is 60 for full pension. I am not anti teacher and I don’t think teacher pensions are excessive anywhere, just saying their pay is better than salary alone would suggest since private sector salaries need to account for retirement savings etc.
I do think the pay structure is bad but that’s not the fault of teachers, it’s the fault of their bosses and politicians who want future bosses/politicians to pay their bills instead
Teachers' unions wield vast political power in blue states like New York and California. If the unions took a stand against grade inflation in those states, they could not be ignored.
We spend more than most developed nations on education on a per pupil basis. Mississippi has produced major gains for its students while spending very little. While I think teachers should be well-compensated (and rewarded for strong results!), the link between spending and education is tenuous.
Where I live teachers top out at around $90k and have great benefits. To my mind the issue is not that unions contribute to grade inflation, it’s that they do not use their political power to fight grade inflation.
Something like 40% of Chicago teachers are chronically absent and Chicago has the test scores to prove it. Teachers are just like police officers, nobody is automatically a saint or a hero because they take a job. Everybody wants to get more money for less work and accountability, and teachers are no exception.
Having been out of school for a while, I'm surprised to learn of this "AP-for-All" thing.
I actually took two AP tests while I was a HS junior, without taking AP classes first. I just paid for the tests and took them. I got a 4 on one test, and a 3 on the other. I mean — I studied, of course…
District admin were shocked… although I have no idea why. There were only something like 5 kids from our 2000+ student high school who passed AP tests as juniors, and each of the others were considered prodigies. I was the oddball, but I can't emphasize how easy it was to just cut a check for the test fee, and sit down for a few hours to write in a blue book. There were literally no obstacles at all.
I took an AP class in German, and the teacher made it clear to us that he expected everyone to score a 4 or 5. He said he'd never once had a student score a 3 in all his years of teaching.
I was so nervous during the test that I didn't answer any of the questions that required speaking into a recorder. That was like half the test. But I still got a 5.
If that many students are failing AP tests, that's a concern.
That's a wild story. Some might find cause for doubt but, having been through this myself, I totally believe it.
I took a class called "Honors U.S. History" while I was a HS sophomore, over a year earlier. We spent an entire semester on the Civil War, and touched lightly on a most of the rest of the lessons. I think that's why I "only" scored a 3 on the AP American History test. I'd just that week finished a class in European History — although it wasn't an "honors" class, and certainly not an "AP" class. I got a 4 on that topic.
Testing took place in a 50-seat classroom in the Central Admin. building, which was the HQ for each of the nine districts in the whole *county*, and not just ours. It was responsible for something like 15,000-20,000 HS students. About 20 kids, from all of these districts together (!), took the American History exam that morning but, since I was literally the *only* kid taking the European History exam in the afternoon, the admins allowed me to use one of their private offices.
It was a long day.
I think test-taking itself is a skill. I'm sure there are test-taking classes available — I recall a private company offering them back in the day (but I forget that company's name). I never took one. Maybe I was unprepared — I don't know — but I cut two checks for $50 to cover the test fees (at the time), walked into a building at 9:00am with a no. 2 pencil, and walked out at 4:00pm with college credit for two classes. I agree with you: if kids are failing AP exams *en masse*, even with all of the learning tools, resources, classes, etc. which I mostly didn't have, or else didn't use (maybe you could say the same?) then there's absolutely a problem with our education process. Maybe it's not only a fault in education at school. Maybe there are cultural/lifestyle/economic/personal forces at work which contribute as much or more to the poor results — but it's really a tragedy, IMO. Culture and society are supposed to build forward with passing time, and not regress or deteriorate.
I took most of my APs in 2018 and the process was the same. Several of them were through a structured class environment, but several (Human Geo, US Govt, Env Science) I took simply by paying CollegeBoard directly and studying on my own.
They sell preparatory material for all of their APs, and it’s hard but straightforward to put in the hours to study. I received a 5 on each of them, and I don’t think it would be out of the question for other students to do the same. I did have one day in which I had to take three AP exams, so I missed the senior festivities, but c’est la vie. It certainly paid off.
There's no new or old technology, no instructor or tutors, and no facility anywhere which is able to learn academics on a student's behalf.
If kids are failing AP tests, it's because *they* themselves have not learned the topics they're being tested on.
Putting the question of curriculum aside for a moment — it's really a pity, I think, that so much thought and effort has been spent by so many people on maximizing efficiency and ease of learning for kids when the truth is that they're not learning because *they* are not learning. Teach them as you like — use pencils, paper, printed books, chalkboards, and lectures; assign hand-written homework; arrange student presentations, etc.; or else use computers, tablets, e-mail homework, video presentations, interactive computer tutorials, whatever — it will always be down to the individual students to learn the lessons.
There's just no sense in ignoring this fact, although it seems like everyone dances around it.
How did that work? Each student was given a recorder and expected to produce a tape of them speaking by the end of the test period? Or there was one recorder at the front and people took turns going up and talking into it? I've never heard of such a thing.
I’m baffled that you indict AP testing as part of the problem— AP testing is at least an objective standard that requires you to learn math if you want to get college credit for statistics or calculus. A major solution to the problems described in the article is simply to go back to standardized testing, which takes evaluation out of the hands of teachers and administrators and removes all possible excuses from students.
> College admissions becoming more cutthroat and time intensive each year, driving student and parent intolerance for low grades
How can this be the case when fewer people are going to college today than in the past few decades? Maybe parents' expectations are more cutthroat, but it's not like there's a lack of overall slots.
> The youth mental health crisis, which has left many young people fragile and makes schools warier of giving low grades
Is there actually a crisis, or just a set of kids whose parents are unwilling to challenge them, and who are unwilling to challenge themselves?
I also don't understand Jerusalem's unwillingness to assign any blame to the kids, especially as they get further along in school. It's fine to say a ten year old can't know what they do and don't know, but if a teenager applying to selective schools can't do fractions, I have a hard time with the idea that there's no responsibility there.
Getting into 'any' college is not cut-throat, but getting into 'top-tier' colleges has become extremely difficult (with a high degree of randomness as well). Among the UCs, UCLA accepts fewer than 10% of applicants, whereas UC Merced accepts over 90%. Although higher education is seeing some declines in enrollment, the top-tier institutions are not.
The problems of “cut-throat” admissions and grade inflation clearly exacerbate each other. High school students and parents all know they’re competing against millions of students with fake grades, and they have to do what they can in the arms race.
High schoolers are sending out more applications and the elite schools haven't grown much, or at all. This means that the headline rate for Harvard is really low, and the admissions process is quite random.
Kids are also much more likely to apply to elite schools across the country from where they live. True of both flagship state schools and elite private schools. While some of the regional somewhat selective schools have had a drop off.
What happened at UCSD is that, after California voters banned affirmative action for a second time in 2020, the admissions department stopped allowing itself to notice that some high schools are tougher than other high schools in order to admit more students from heavily Hispanic high schools. UCSD went much further in this direction than did UCLA or Berkeley.
Ironically, emphasizing GPA uber alles has been bad for middle-class black and Hispanic families who strove to get their kids into better schools, where they seldom stand out academically but at least can escape pressure to join gangs. In 2022, only 2.6 percent of black applicants to UCSD from affluent public high schools were accepted, down from an already miserable 6.1 percent in 2020. In contrast, 11.6 percent of black applicants from poor schools got in.
Among Hispanics in better schools, the acceptance rate fell from 19.4 percent to 15.1 percent, whereas 28.3 percent of downscale Hispanics were accepted in 2022.
In contrast to UCSD’s new strategy, private colleges like Harvard love affluent black and (to a lesser extent) Latino applicants and instead worry about whether kids from the hood can make the big jump.
Ironically, poorer whites and Asians have been big winners from eliminating the SAT. In 2020, only 80 whites at downscale L.A. County public schools were accepted by UCSD compared to 536 in 2022. Poorer Asians accepted surged from 310 to 1601.
Without the SAT or ACT, the failure of UCSD to flag unprepared students at the point of college admission makes sense. But how are these students and districts going unnoticed on statewide standardized testing? Does CA not do any statewide testing anymore?
We do (just once in high school— grade 11), and the scores are pretty horrible for English and even worse for math statewide. It just doesn’t matter for anything or mean anything, really. It shows up on our CA Dashboard, which correlates with funding, but so do many many other datapoints like graduation rate, number of students meeting college entrance requirements (this means passing classes deemed A-G), suspension rate, and many others. It’s easier to game the others so that’s where the focus is for a lot of schools.
I thought the concern about "teaching to the test" wasn't that it gamed the system, it was that it would teach the students shallow skills that made them good at taking the test, but would not generalize to other things. Teachers I have known have expressed frustration at test prep taking away from activities like storytime and recess.
I am personally of the opinion that school should have a decent amount of fun activities, even if they don't directly prepare for the test. If we are going to force someone to be somewhere at gunpoint, we should at least have the decency to make sure they aren't constantly bored.
Test prep taking away from "story time"? The classes ARE the test prep. If you haven't learned it in class test prep isn't going to get you much. You can get "story time" when you've learned the lesson.
That simply isn't true. There are a lot of lessons designed to specifically prepare kids for a test and are not part of the general curriculum. I remember them decades ago and they've only gotten worse since then.
Things like story time and recess are an important part of school, they aren't some kind of indulgence that kids get as a reward if they do well in academics. Forcing kids to spend all their time working on academics is sadistic and counterproductive. Besides, if the kids finish the lesson people will just start saying they should learn the next lesson instead of story time. The only way to stop people like that is to stand firm and tell them no, they don't get destroy everyone's childhoods. We banned child labor because childhood is supposed to be a fun and magical experience, not so we could replace it with a job just as grueling as a real job that the kids don't even get paid for.
If they teach to the test that has arithmetic and order of operations, the students would be better off. If they teach to a test that included reading, then at least the students will be able to read. A single test in 11th grade is too late— of course they’re going to pass the students.
Thank you. Can CA link the UCSD students with their performance on those tests? How did they pass the basic tests yet not be able to answer basic arithmetic questions?
Those tests are used to assess schools' overall performance, not individual students (the scores sometimes come up with regard to whether someone needs an IEP, but otherwise they have no academic impact). It's likely they may not have received proficient scores on those tests.
I run a fairly large PhD program in biological sciences. The students we admit have never looked better on paper. They interview very well. But we are finding that their actual preparation is far behind where our (less good on paper) students were ten years ago. Lots of remedial biochemistry and genetics needs to be taught. As for coping skills, well, that is an entirely different conversation, and not a happy one. Most of the students find their footing and do well, in some cases outstanding, which tells us that their native talent and aptitude is there. But the on-ramp is longer and more effort-intensive, for both faculty and students, that any of us have experienced previously. And it is also quite negative, in that many have a hard time dealing with not getting top grades while they are still in the process of learning how to learn, rather than performing. They are being underserved by their primary and secondary educational experiences.
We saw this in our program for a few cohorts in a row, but its gotten better as the Covid generation moved out. The kids in college during covid (often) did not learn the foundations of molecular biology. But the most recent cohorts have not had this problem. I think the biology PhD program issue was largely covid and not systemic issues that this article portrays.
Hopefully we start to see this move. There was a high degree of helplessness with the COVID cohorts that does seem to be getting better, but the preparation issues don't seem to be abating.
That surprises me. I was in a top statistics PhD program during COVID and the admissions standards and student quality there have risen enormously in recent decades. I scored a 168/170 on the quant section of the GRE, did an undergrad math minor to take many courses beyond calculus, and did multiple summer research programs. I say that not to brag, but that’s basically table stakes to even be considered at a top tier statistics PhD programs. In turn, it was relatively common for students to place out of lower level graduate courses and quickly start contributing to research that is much more complex and mathematically/computationally demanding than in the past.
If the problem, or part of the problem, is grade inflation and dropping the SATs, and prior to those developments, students admitted were prepared, doesn't that also mean that there is some group of students who would have been prepared, and otherwise would have gotten in, but didn't get in because the UC system has denied them the ability to show they deserve it?
Yes, that’s an argument against dropping standardized testing, you won’t identify students who do well on standardized testing but work at a restaurant or something instead of being able to do extracurriculars and get recommendations and may be missed because everyone’s GPA is high and they are undifferentiated.
You’ll also miss kids who figure something out in high school, might not have perfect grades but do well on standardized testing.
Yes, my kid had a 750 math SAT and didn’t get into UCSD. He was waitlisted and never got the call. He has a friend who didn’t get into UCSD, UCLA or Berkeley. The friend got into Columbia. Parents at our large public high school can tell these stories all day long.
Let me guess - your kid is white or Asian ? This piece is absolutely dishonest in its exclusion of what’s happening at UCSD and why - overt, illegal racial discrimination in favor of Hispanics due to the pursuit of designation as a Hispanic serving institution and a back room deal with the Hispanic caucus in the legislature. These students in remedial math are almost all Hispanic kids admitted from low performing schools by design. Admissions knows they’re not qualified. This is absolutely illegal nd the Trump administration should pursue civil rights charges.
Centrist liberals will often dance around the affirmative action aspect of this while expressing frustration about the system failing kids.
The UC system dropped the SAT against despite their experts saying it was crucial in admitting the best students. What was their motivation? Why are some students with excellent credentials being rejected in favor of those who would fail an 8th grade math class? These questions are unexplored.
The issue is that for much of students’ primary educations they were just passed forward without concern over whether they showed comprehension or competency with course materials.
If every student gets an A then there is no signal as to where to allocate efforts or where knowledge deficiencies lie.
It's true. I wouldn't have gotten in without my test scores, but Richard Reeves has also noted that dropping testing requirements has been really terrible for boys' college admissions, since they have worse GPAs than girls but higher test scores.
I live in Singapore and am an unusual American who sends their kids to public school where they practice grade deflation so that kids study harder for their leaving exams (O Levels and A Levels) which are the only grades that matter for the next level of education. To get an A on an exam you require 70%. A C is 55%. A is considered above and beyond. B is very, very good. C is average. Even the smartest kids are meant to feel stupid. Math and science is easily two years ahead of the equivalent in the US. Is this a better system? Not completely sure. The pressure on kids is immense and many of my expat friends leave the system because their kids can’t cope. Local kids can’t leave and there is a huge stigma about the intense streaming starting in 3rd grade. (There is a popular movie series called “I not Stupid.”). There must be a happy medium somewhere. Meanwhile my US kids are applying to US universities and admission counselors don’t understand that Bs and Cs are considered normal here. I’d be shocked if more than 5% of a class gets straight A’s.
My own experience is that courses like those you described, where an A is truly exceptional mastery of the material, and a C constitutes a solid grasp of the material, pushed me to become a much stronger student. It was uncomfortable at the time, but I was far better off in the long run for the experience. I doubt many teachers have the fortitude or backing of the organization to do it today, but those who do are an invaluable resource to their students.
Is the idea they specifically try and put in questions that no one/few will answer correctly (almost outside of the course material), some that are more difficult, some you are expected answer correctly, and easy "gimmies" to pull out something that more resembles a bell curve?
That is an old time standard university trick - 80% of the exam material is material that was directly covered in either the book/assigned readings/lecture material and the remaining 20% is somewhat above and beyond that would have been encounteres if the student went a bit above and beyond or had exceptional aptitude. With fractional credit for the hard questions, good students will earn solid B's. There will be a few who earn A's, solid students will get C's. I definitely had exams like that in Grad school in Physics and Engineering.
The teachers would do some curving because sometimes the questions asked turned out to be more damanding than expected. But I had classes where no A's were awarded at all, with the highest grade awarded being a B+.
I was going off memory but one of my physics teachers really did not like having a large A/B skew in testing results (felt this reflected poorly on him, was he testing our subject knowledge well enough) so he tried to add questions he expected most to fail to answer and added a curve (?)
I speculate (without hard data) at how much of this is also driven by parents. Many parents bully the schools who try and fail - or even mark down - their children, and teachers don’t have the support of their administrations. Why stick your neck out to fight parents AND your own principal? Furthermore, (here’s my pet cause), with the phones and video games and entertainment options we have available, students simply don’t work as hard or practice math, music or reading to anywhere near the same extent they used to. Teachers can’t even assign full books anymore, as kids won’t read them! That was absolutely not the case 25 years ago!
So beyond grade inflation and passing-by-default, we may have to admit that many parents are failing to get their kids to work, and are bullying schools and teachers instead.
As always, the most advantaged kids aren’t the ones who’ll pay the price for this. Their parents will step in, hire tutors, or put them in a private school.
So I feel like I’ve heard two narratives about education trends that feel in tension. One is what you say about students lacking an attention span and being passed through with grade inflation in classes with lower standards. But the other narrative I’ve heard is almost the opposite: that schools are assigning more homework than ever, college admissions to even public schools are more competitive than ever, and children are overscheduled and overworked.
I supposed the answer is possibly that the latter describes the experience of the top 10%-20% of students (in socioeconomic status) while the grade inflation and lower standards affect the bottom third or half.
Actually, both these things can be true. If you assign a ton of homework, but only grade it for completion, you can use it to give people A's who are failing their tests. The kids can easily get completion credit by copying their friends homework or filling in random answers. If you make 70% of the grade homework, 20% in-class work, and 10% tests, the kids can get literally 0% for all their tests and still have an A in the class.
Teachers also sometimes say that something is really important to do and the kid can't pass without it, the kid doesn't do it, and they still pass the kid. Happened to me when I was in 5th grade with my president report, and that was 2001-2002. These are problems of longstanding that have only gotten worse with time.
Why has it gotten more competitive to get into college? Because so many kids have these meaningless 4.0 GPAs! When a 4.0 meant something substantial, not that many kids had them. Somewhere very selective might only accept 4.0 students, but there wouldn't be enough of those to make up classes for every selective school, so other schools would take people with slightly lesser grades. When there are enough 4.5 GPAs to make up the entire Ivy League's freshmen class 10x over, the kids need to do extras to make sure they're in that 1 in 10 who actually make it. That's why they're all Eagle Scouts who do varsity lacrosse and coded a symphony-creating app.
Indeed, this was my circumstance in high school. My chemistry teacher had to allow me to turn in a lot of late work for me to pass a class that he hired me to tutor his other students in on days before tests. Tests were more meaningful to his grade than the split I suggested above, but turning in lab reports was a pretty significant portion of the grade that I wouldn't have done otherwise.
Grades that show that you complete assignments are not meaningless; after all, it's hard to succeed in college without diligence. But I basically think the university qualifications that were around when I got into the UC system were closer to correct. A combination of GPA, SAT/ACT, AP scores, essays, high school ranking, and extracurriculars was a pretty good way to see who'd succeed in college. I would like to see stronger economic weighting to stack the deck against rich kids who really don't need a fancy education to succeed in life, but taking out the testing was not at all the right answer.
I think your second paragraph is mostly what resolves the tension you see (and is moreover correct), but iirc the data show that homework has gone down in reality - at least, in most countries’ public systems. Could be wrong though, I’m not certain about that point.
Though that applies to elementary school kids. From doing some googling it seems like for high schoolers the amount is either unchanged or declining a bit.
It isn’t driven by parents. It’s driven by racism and OP has been dishonest in not disclosing it. This is occurring exclusively at low income Hispanic schools. UCSD knows these kids are behind but admits them instead of more qualified Asian and white admits. Steve sailer did extensive research on this already.
Perhaps in the specific context of the university mentioned in the essay. But this goes on in my white-ass Canadian hometown, where my inclination to blame parents is perhaps more strongly grounded.
As a teacher (at a private school full of students with their eyes on fancy colleges), I've noticed the incentives pretty much all push us toward grade inflation. Administrators are happier when parents don't complain. Parents are happy to be told their kids are straight-A superstars (not realizing that half the class has straight As). College counselors act like a B on a kid's transcript is the end of the world. Kids, of course, aren't going to pitch a fit about getting better grades for worse work. And they will drop our classes if they seem "too hard," because they have learned that the point of school is to get good grades above all else.
Really, the only thing holding off grade inflation is teachers' collective and personal sense of professional pride, which is hard to maintain year after year, especially if your colleagues are already inflating their grades and you feel like the only one who's holding the line.
I wish that everyone in the system could treat grades as information rather than some sort of all-important judgment on a student's worth. If we could take the temperature down around grading, we might be able to be more honest and constructive with students rather than just giving them high grades and passing them on.
These aren’t private school kids - they’re middle and low income Mexican kids from the San Diego area. Kids who get 5 on the AP CALC test from Palo Alto and Mountain View are getting rejected from UCSD in favor of these applicants due to overt and illehal affirmative action workarounds
In the UK they simply don't use teacher given grades for anything - the grades that matter are from national standardized exams that are best compared to AP tests.
The idea of focusing on GPAs rather than SATs is deeply flawed. Grades are an extremely fuzzy metric. They can be inflated if a student gets the teacher to like them, feel sorry for them, or otherwise manipulate the system. Grading also lacks meaningful standardization between teachers, let alone schools. You wouldn’t determine the tallest student by having different researchers measure different kids with their own uncalibrated rulers-yet that’s exactly what relying on GPA does.
If anything, colleges should stop considering GPAs and rely solely on standardized testing. This would allow true apples-to-apples comparisons (or comparison to an objective readiness standard) and make classroom grades far more useful. Right now, teachers hesitate to give failing students Fs because of the damage to their GPA, which fuels grade inflation and leaves students unaware of how far behind they are. If standardized tests were the only academic metric that mattered, teachers would assign honest grades without worry, and those grades would actually help students identify weaknesses and improve.
Non-academic factors could still be considered. Colleges could continue giving advantages to low-income students, those with impressive extracurricular achievements, or other holistic criteria. But standardized test scores would give admissions offices a clear picture of incoming students’ academic preparation, ensuring the institution can actually support those it admits. After all, a college does no favors to a promising but underprepared student by accepting them without the resources to help them catch up and succeed.
Yes. There was nothing more frustrating as a student than the game of "which professor grades the most leniently". Striver-types would chart their entire academic course based on who would give them the easiest A. They were totally focused on "scores, not skills" which is completely backwards.
A system that relies on objective tests to show proficiency would much better align incentives. Grades don't matter, finding the easiest prof doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is actually mastering the material and learning the skills the course is designed to teach.
There has never been a time when anything like a majority of America's students were performing well in abstract mathematics. There's no falling off because that's not something we ever accomplished. We used to accept that the college track was for a small minority of the most talented students. Now we force everyone into that pipeline. And you're surprised when a lot of those who were forced in are failing?
The article talks about grade inflation and UC schools dropping standardized testing, which the article implies functioned as a stopgap against grade inflation. That doesn't imply that today's high school students are any worse at math than they were, only that the UC system is now worse at determining which students are college-ready.
Previously, you may have had grade inflation, making it so it was hard to tell which students could cut it in college based on GPA alone, but the students who could not would do poorly on their SATs and either only get into less selective colleges or not go to college at all. Now, without the SATs, UCSC can't tell which students have a 4.0 GPA because they understand the material and which are unqualified, but still have a 4.0 because of grade inflation, which means they will wind up taking a lot more unqualified students, even if the composition of high school seniors remains the same.
Please. I have an honors bsc in cs and math. The sample question posted in the article is not "advanced math". I was taught to solve these in _grade 6_.
One must wonder what knock-on effects this has on real learning (as opposed to credential receipt) in the other STEM classes which have math as a prerequisite.
Anecdote time: in 2022-23 I spent a school year as a volunteer high school CS teacher co-teaching a course over Zoom to a classroom of 11th and 12th grade students in an underprivileged rural area of Mississippi. I could give you a long rant about the many, many ways in which those students (almost all African-American) were set up to fail, but lack of real math preparation was a central factor. The curriculum we used, an online Python intro course from Carnegie Mellon, was graphics-based and intended to put students on a path to coding simple games. So, they naturally used an X-Y coordinate system to locate points on the screen where you could draw shapes using their included drawing library. As the exercises progressed, you had to reason more and more about relative position and movement in terms of those X and Y coordinates, and to do very simple algebra similar to that 7+2 = X+6 problem you led with.
None, not a one, of those students could do the required mathematical reasoning with anything close to fluency. All of them had, per the onsite lead teacher, passed the Algebra I course which was a prerequisite for the class. Now, given the timing, some of them must have taken a pandemic version of the class. And the vaunted "Mississippi Miracle" reforms probably were too new to have benefited them back in elementary school. But regardless, they simply did not have the intellectual scaffolding needed to understand how to solve the problems and build the skills in that course.
I was not involved in the grading for that CS class. But I doubt very much that they were all given failing grades. Several of them, after all (and this was one of the most heartbreaking parts!) were clearly bright and engaged and trying their best. And so the cycle of fake credentials continues.
Are you aware that this statement is false, "Any student of any age can go learn anything they want at a community college."? Please read AB 705 and AB1705 and you will see that California Community Colleges are no longer able to offer remedial math courses. We are having to justify keeping trig and college algebra as prerequisites to calculus. The state of California is failing our potential STEM students.
I've taught high school math in low income inner city schools for six years. In most schools, about 2/3s of all students cannot solve -5+2 without the help of a calculator. Most of these students are getting Bs and some As. I've taught a lot of the same students computer science, and they seem to pick up the material reasonably well. These students aren't stupid by any stretch, and most are capable of doing much higher level of math.
However, even the smart kids are never held to a remotely high academic standard. Unfortunately, there's no way to teach an Algebra II class without failing overwhelming majority of students if they were held to the same standards as upper middle class kids. It's unfortunately a lot easier just a lot easier to pass kids along to higher math classes where the teacher might as well be talking in Tagalog given how many prequisites they are missing.
1) I currently teach at a school that teaches the same group of students but holds kids to real standards. The majority of freshman have at least one D or F. If a school is willing to fail huge number of students, you can hold kids to a higher standards.
2) The first school I taught at was always at risk of having enrollment numbers fall below the minumum threshold. They were afraid to expel dangerous students, or fail kids who clearly could not read or write so we were basically not allowed to fail kids.
3) The second school I taught at truly believed in a lot of progressive mythologizing. We were not allowed to give less than a 50 on any assignments and had a mandate for at least 80% of my students to have As and Bs.
4) More generally, if too many students have Fs that they have no means of raising to a passing grade, classroom management becomes a nightmare. As a teacher, I can't hold kids to standards that are impossible for them to meet. If a kid gets to precalc and can't solve (1/2)+(1/3) (the majority of kids at the highest scoring majority black high school in the state of Indiana), I can't give them an F if they are clearly trying the best,
It wasn't per se mandated. However teachers who gave their kids high grades would get lots of praise, while those who didn't had endless meetings and interventions to get their student grades up. Eventually most get the hint and just pass everyone along.
Funders love the school. They were always getting all kinds of accolades and money and grants for a million things the school did. Leadership was really good at saying all the right things, and lots of kids were passing "advanced" classes.
Also, 6% of students were deemed college ready for math.
My kids start each new year with weeks of review of more basic concepts before they learn anything new.
Is that not the case at your school? For example, in your pre-Calc class what would stop you from spending the first semester on foundational skills rather than jumping into the pre-Calc concepts?
I don't currently lead teach pre-calc (I push in as extra support for Math) but what happens in practice is one of three things.
1) You stop the class and reteach every major whole in student understanding. The class ceases to be a precalc class, and becomes an Algebra I class. If a kids passes this class, the transcript will say they passed precalc when they only relearned Algebra 1.
2) You plow through and give bonus points at the ends so that the kids grades look OK.
3) You take away everyone's lunch for more math time (which is what we do) and you can guess how popular this is.
#1 is useful to the students if they in fact learn the Algebra 1 material even if the transcript is inaccurate.
#2 seems only useful to the kids who were already ready and likely to leave the majority even further behind.
#3 I can see how this would be both unpopular, but also unproductive over the long run. If studies show adults perform better with a lunch break, how much more important is a break for teens.
#1 might be the least bad option but it still has its problems. There are usually a handful of students who are close to grade level in every class, and those are the only students who have any chance of getting STEM degrees. They'll get to college thinking the are ready for college level math classes while barely ever grappling with any truly difficult math. Its unfair to the students genuinely capable of high level work to never even see high level work be fore college.
(1) they didn’t learn it the first time slow, they aren’t likely to learn it the fourth time fast (2) and then what, do all of precalculus in half the time? You think that’s going to leave them well prepared for calculus?
If most students arrive in a pre-Calc class without Algebra 1 skills and other gaps in their math understanding, I think it is better to deal with the algebra 1 and other fundamental gaps before going on to pre-Calc work. At least then students are learning. You wouldn’t have so many students in remedial college classes unable to answer primary school and middle school questions.
Ideally, the primary school, middle school, high school are on the same page, teaching students where they are and challenging students to learn and practice for the sake of getting better rather than just worrying about a grade on the transcript.
Well, yes, but that’s just saying we should have students repeat classes they aren’t prepared in with more steps, and without being administratively honest. What grade do you give a student who had to spend the pre calculus year relearning algebra? If it’s a passing grade, they’ll be enrolled in calculus next year. If it’s a failing grade, then they’ll were lied to by the previous year’s passing grade. It’s really rather mysterious who’s in a position to start to reform the situation.
Can confirm number 4. I taught at school where we were literally not allowed to count formative assignments towards the grade, rigid standards were set by an outside body, and it was an urban school where the average student was several grade levels behind in everything. The happiest teachers were the ones who just blatantly refused to hold the standards we were supposed to and gave out As.
And not holding the smart students to a high standard is debilitating to them. School becomes boring and rote. It also doesn’t teach them valuable skills of hard work, persistence, and practice.
Kelsey, there's so much here. Thank you for tackling it. Grade inflation is rampant. I've had parents tell me that they're paying for that A. No lie.
Different actors have different incentives, largely depending on their position in this system.
As a teacher, I am often doing the best I can with the students assigned (AP or not). Hitting pause and "going back to teach remedial skills" is often not an option because of the system dynamics (curriculum police, data point improvements, politics of moving students up or down, the list goes on and on).
I'm not disagreeing with your anger, but the system (as a whole) is signalling not educating. For whatever that's worth.
Why are variables always called "X", anyway — I mean, in equations with only a single unknown? Ever wonder why this is?
Sure, other letters which are used to represent constants are off-limits — but who said variables need to be letters, at all? They could be punctuation, or a special characters… or bespoke, funky designs of some kind. Like that symbol Prince used for a while during the 1990s, when he was called "The artist formerly known as…"
The SAT would (at least used to, I don't know the current version) use crazy symbols to represent functions. Like it would say
"smiley-face x = x+3, so what is smiley-face 5?"
I loved these questions as a high schooler because once you understood how they worked they were often the easiest ones on the test. The "difficulty" of them came from the fact that they were exotic and not typically seen in class, so once you understood them they were basically freebies.
I think simply "what does 'X' mean?" gums a lot of kids up.
This is an interesting perspective; that jargon sometimes gets in the way of understanding. In retrospect, most of the time I struggled to understand a concept, it was me not understanding the jargon, rather than the concept. Especially in college.
I think that often this is because a concept is so basic that it's difficult for someone who has mastered the concept to understand someone seeing it for the first time.
Don't get me started on trying to teach the difference between a number and a numeral to elementary school kids (I hope they don't still do that). Teach how to solve problems first. Give kids a win. Save the philosophical concepts for later.
I couldn't have stated this better. Jargon is evil. It's an elitist language perversion which defines in-groups and excludes outsiders. It's an instrument of manipulation as well, when custom definitions of common terms are designated as jargon. We'd understand much more — and we'd understand each other much more, I think — if we just stuck with the OED.
Try writing out a quadratic equation in plain English, it looks something like “ twice the area of a square and 5 of the length of the perimeter is ten. What is the size of the square?” Knowing basic algebra is essential for any high school math, and certainly for anything in college. People simply need to learn it, and schools need to teach it.
Describing math equations in plain English would be a great exercise for kids who are learning to grasp these skills. It would provide a logical bridge from the tangible, concrete world to the abstractions of math, which they could reference anytime they lose the thread. I think this should be a standard, “best practice” exercise. Have the kids write a bunch of these down and, separately, have them speak one or two out loud in front of the rest of the class. What an idea. 👍
Students often have trouble understanding that f(x) := x^2 + 1 and g(y) := y^2 + 1 are the same function. If you think about it, that's actually a very abstract insight. It leads to much less confusion if you start off with being consistent about the naming of variables.
Even in abstract math, we often use the variable names to help reinforce some semantic information. x,y,z are often coordinates in space, A,B,C are often matrices, n,m,k,l are often integers, etc.
There's one notably missing group in this critique: parents. When I was in school, and continuing into my adulthood now, where I'm going to kindergarten information sessions, there's a fixation that borders on obsession with grades. That filters down to students. Many parents and students, perhaps a majority, don't really care about learning things or acquiring skills. They care about accumulating credentials so that they can gain admission to a brand name college followed by a brand name job. Some students will cheat to get there. Others' parents will do their schoolwork for them. When students fall short, parents cajole and browbeat teachers not to change B's into A's, but to turn C's into A's.
It's obviously not all students, but it's a very substantial chunk. And it's hard for schools to resist this push because school has become a market, and the commodity being purchased isn't education-- it's high grades. If a teacher grades rigorously, parents will complain and students and parents will figure out a way to get into a different teacher's class. If a school's grades are collectively lower, they'll have a harder time gaining admission to colleges, which in turn makes the school less desirable for future students. And on down the line.
I teach at a UC. I required students in an intro course -- mostly freshmen -- to upload a Google Docs link to their essay so that it could be checked for AI typing patterns. I explained this requirement in lecture, in the syllabus, in the instructions for the assignment, and on the page where the assignment should be uploaded. About half the class did not follow instructions. The inability of students to read and process information and follow instructions is honestly quite shocking, and it makes me fearful for their future.
Speaking as a public school educator, I really appreciate how your analysis digs into how this grade inflation is failing the kids (who are often blamed for it). I also want to make sure we are not blaming the high school teachers here- which I don’t think you do - but it’s worth spelling out the various forces driving this phenomena outside a teachers’ control:
1) Rigid and punitive school evaluation systems at the district level incentivize schools to juke their stats (accountability is good, but may district admins are mini-tyrants)
2) The huge and well funded expansion of AP-for-All, which pushes more kids into ‘college level’ classes sooner (I now routinely see kids from charters who are taking AP classes in 7th grade - huh???)
3) College admissions becoming more cutthroat and time intensive each year, driving student and parent intolerance for low grades
4) The youth mental health crisis, which has left many young people fragile and makes schools warier of giving low grades
It’s sad because AP for All is really a response to the long, sad history of how tracking has failed students. But rather than fix the root problem - that schools often had low or no expectations for students in low tracked classes - we’ve instead just fixed the optics and are serving all student less well.
I’m not sure how we get out of this given how deeply entangled all these factors are.
I think the impetus for change will likely come from the university level. They will realize they are getting unprepared students who aren't able to actually succeed at the professional level that universities rely on (for prestige, for rankings, for donations) and they'll change how they evaluate students which will cascade down to shifts in K-12 behavior, and student/parent incentives.
I was a university professor. I'm afraid that the situation isn't playing out as you and I would hope.
Universities are indeed changing the ways in which they evaluate students. They've been doing it gradually for many years—by inflating grades—and now they are turning to other methods as well. Consider the move in undergraduate and graduate programs toward "contract grading," which often amounts to grading students by the proportion of assignments completed, rather than by the quality of their work.
> [Universities] will realize they are getting unprepared students who aren't able to actually succeed at the professional level that universities rely on (for prestige, for rankings, for donations)
They may realize it, but what incentive will they have to do anything about it?
You mention prestige and rankings. But take a look at the method behind the most influential rankings: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings. Graduation and retention rates, done up various ways, account for 42-47% of the scores that U.S. News and World Report uses to rank colleges. Post-grad outcomes account for only 10% of those scores. In short, the rankings incentivize the handing-out of degrees, but they don't incentivize colleges to care about students' post-graduation outcomes.
The contract grading is indeed a problem, which is often done in the name of equity. But adding fuel to the fire is the carry over from cancel culture of students who will complain to Deans for being called out on a bad essay or otherwise graded down. So some professors are grading less rigorously because they don't want to deal with any sort administrative conflict that could arise.
Jelani Nelson a professor at Berkeley in the EECS department has been on this for quite a while fighting back against watering down educational standards.
I think that is, sadly, unlikely. The faculty who actually teach have very little say in admissions and larger issues of policy; the UCSD report that has caused all this fuss was the product of several years of alarm-sounding at every level of faculty, from instructors to department chairs. What they got was...this report. That's it. If you read the latest utterances from Jim Rawlins at UCSD, his message is essentially "all UCSD students belong here and we are staying the course." Prestige as awarded by rankings won't play a role. The US News rankings of the UCs have gone up, not down, because US News and most other rankings calculate "selectivity" in terms of rejections. The UCs got many more apps by going test-blind, and thus produced more rejections, and instantly became "better" in terms of rankings. The UCs also gained in terms of yield by following these policies; by rejecting stronger students who likely had other good options, and offering admissions to thousands of less-prepared students who almost certainly did not have better options (because their applications didn't look so great when viewed through the holistic lens that other, non-UC institutions review applicants) UCSD bumped up its yield, too. In fact, the word "yield" is used conspicuously--several times--in the 53-page report. No, I don't think that the impetus for change will come from the university level. And since Trump's "corrections" are even more illiberal, short-sighted, and destructive than the UC's transgressions, it's hard to see how exactly this gets corrected, other than the slow groundswell of shame and commonsense that this article has, thankfully, helped to push along.
The University of California (UC) system is tax-funded and must allow equity of access. It continues to operate its Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) program, which guarantees admission to at least one UC campus for eligible California residents who rank in the top 9% of their high school graduating class (not 2%-3%, as that reflects an earlier iteration of the program before it expanded to 9% in 2012 to better align with the California Master Plan for Higher Education). This applies to students from participating public high schools across the state, provided they meet minimum UC admission requirements, such as completing 15 yearlong A-G courses (with at least 11 before their senior year) and maintaining a minimum 3.0 GPA in those courses during 10th and 11th grades. Teachers are pressure to ensure a C-grade to promising, capable students or those in each schools top 9%.
CA tax funded UCs are public colleges that must admit students from every CA public high school, not only those from certain zip codes, or those proficient in reading or math. Until all CA elementary schools are prioritized by CA’s Dept of Education and communities to ensure basics are mastered by third grade, forget improving outcomes later.
77% of CA college freshmen are not qualified, not prepared for college level work. However, CA needs college grads requiring moving students along. Some district 5th graders passed the CA high school exit exam which was DEI discontinued because majority of 12th grade high schoolers could not pass.
CA Diplomas are meaningless without standardized proctor testing under specific equatable testing conditions. Engineers have meaningful diplomas, plus a stamp to prove it.
I find it hard not to include teachers in the blame. They are participants in the ruination of a generation.
I teach in a charter and am outside of your union complaint raised below but for about 5 years we've all been having equitable standards pushed down on us. Do nothing get a 50, grades structured in a way that precludes individual accountability for learning things.
Maybe me and the teachers around me are unrepresentative but put good curriculum in our hands and back us up when parents bitch about the grades and not create a Rube Goldberg machine of things you have to do because a student isn't doing their work seems like pretty straightforward prescription. Usually I've been overruled looking for more accountability.
Agreed. This mainly comes from administrative pressure on teachers. Should we fight back more? Sure, but then we look like the meanie in the department.
Thank you for your insight.
YUP!!! "Equitable" grading practices are a big part of the problem here. I fight tooth and nail against them in my building, but they are still pretty pervasive.
Teachers are often following incentives and have had their agency to access students undercut by administrators.
This is happening in colleges and is driving professors insane with the rampant cheating and grade appeals.
In blue states like New York the teachers' union wields vast power at the state and local levels. Their support can make or break a candidate (almost always a Democrat). If the union, as the collective voice of teachers, took a stand, it could not be ignored.
I would argue that unions are generally not the collective voices of who they represent but rather the most politically inclined segment of that population.
Got to remember most people are just trying to get by in the world and support their families.
In reality that is true, but union officers are elected by teachers. As in many things with politics, people who stay home relinquish their voices.
New York has statewide standards and tests and teachers are under the gun to produce good results. These results by district are reported online https://c2dcd148.caspio.com/dp/f233b00064d44eb48c544a3cbd17
Unfortunately, if a student comes into a class lacking the foundational skills (for whatever reason including moving from out of state), they usually won't get moved back to a level where they belong and the teacher will get blamed for their lack of progress. Ditto for students who need to be evaluated for learning disabilities but whose parents won't grant permission. The teacher is stuck teaching everyone the material that will be on the state test at the end of the year, even if some of the students would be better served by going back and learning the basics.
Thank you. Yes, it requires discipline at every grade not to advance a student who is not ready. That has to be supported by the state Ed Dept, school administration, and the unions. At the end of the day, you're doing the student a favor.
It's not just discipline unfortunately. There's structural and budget issues. Let's say you have a district with K-5 in one building and 6-8 in another. There's a student who is ready to move on to 6th grade except that they are at a 4th grade level in math. Clearly you don't want to keep them in the K-5 building, but there is no 4th grade math class offered in the 6-8 building and perhaps not enough students/teachers/classroom space to justify having one. The solution where I taught would be to offer remediation during a free period, but you are still giving the student the Math 6 exam at the end of the year. I think that's educational malpractice.
Also, it's great to have high standards and publish them, but the district doesn't have a lot of incentive to get a 6th grade student who is at 4th grade level in math up to a 5th grade level in math. Why? Because when all the stats come out, they are still going to show up as lacking proficiency as a 6th grader! There's every incentive for districts to invest in the edge cases and provide the most assistance for students whose progress will show up in the statistics. I am not making this up, I worked in such a district! It's how the sausage is made….
The pressure isn’t coming from unions. They mostly care about how teachers are treated, so if anything they would back a teacher’s right to fail a student.
Agree. This grade inflation is a huge problem in my southern non-union state.
Yes, teachers are often not incentivized to teach, or care if students learn. That is undoubtedly part of the problem. But they (metonymy for teachers' unions -and- teachers) also often strongly resist any attempts to incentivize effective teaching. Things like metrics, standardized testing, and observation are the only way to know if teachers are teaching effectively and provide feedback, and most teachers hate that shit and push back on it. They are absolutely not the innocent victims of admin.
You could argue that the union is representing the self-interest of teachers - and of course, that IS its purpose - and that the self-interest of the teachers does not necessarily share complete overlap with the interests of students. A teachers' union making unreasonable demands CAN be part of a functional system, it's just one that has to be offset by other forces. The administrations and local governments that negotiate with those teachers' unions have given in to the wrong demands.
As long as other stakeholders are just going to roll over and do what the teachers' unions wants (we might call it "the Chicago Model") then you're gonna get bad outcomes for everybody but the teachers. You shouldn't really expect any different. (If one were opposed to the idea of public sector unions generally it is a good point of attack, certainly.)
I dunno. The unions have played a role in this decline, no doubt. And the unions are controlled by the teachers, collectively. And the same mistakes in dealing with those unions have been made by hundreds of school districts. It's one of those things where it's kind of everybody's fault, which kind of makes it nobody's, right?
(Of course then you have outlier situations like the UC system dropping SAT requirements where you very much can point to the people who screwed up and hold them accountable.)
I agree: teachers and teachers’ unions share in the blame
Hahahaha.
Sure. Plenty of teachers suck. Possibly a majority. I know not just because of my experience as a student, but because of what good teachers have told me.
Not a fan a teacher unions in the least, but in their defense, I do not see much reason to place blame on them here. Rather, look towards the same colleges that are now pissed off about student preparedness for college level work. The push for equitable outcomes at any cost comes from the ivory tower, not the teacher unions.
Teachers would be fine with metrics if they were fair: don’t expect a special ed teacher to have the same results as an AP teacher. But generally teachers, since the early 2000s, have been blamed for teaching in the “wrong” classroom or school. Meanwhile, students are accountable for nothing. At my school they leave after the last class whether they’re failing everything or getting all As.
Should teachers stay at school 24/7 to provide all this extra practice? Should we defy our superiors when they tell us to allow unlimited retakes of tests?
Thank you for your comment. Even though it was rhetorical, I would answer that in states with strong public teachers' unions, it can start with electing local union reps who will fight for better educational outcomes AND good contracts.
Let’s not forget the culpability teachers’ unions in states with strong unions.
Yes, teachers are a part of the broken system - can’t disagree.
I certainly don’t see it that way as regards to unions. In my mind a huge root cause of the issue is that education as a sector lacks talent, which is because it is not possible to make a living wage as an educator in many states. Entrenched unions can create a different set of issues for sure, but a huge plus is that they ensure salary, benefits, and workers right protections that make it more possible for talented workers to choose the sector.
I don’t really see how unions contribute to grade inflation - if anything a strong union protects the right of a demanding teacher to hold a hard line on grades if they want to.
Pay in education is fine - the problem is that it’s almost all in extremely valuable benefits (large pensions and retirement at 55) and very little of it comes in salary, which is the absolute worst way to attract talented kids in their 20s into a field since no normal 18 year old chooses their college major based on retirement benefits. There is a reason no normal jobs pay like this.
Anecdotally too, it seems like working conditions for teachers have gotten worse, especially at public schools. Teachers feel like they’re increasingly pressured by both parents and administrators and have little recourse to push back against even the last reasonable members of those groups. I have multiple ex-teacher friends who have talked about this.
What constitutes “fine” is certainly up for debate, but here’s my view: something like 40% of ivy graduates are going into finance and consulting jobs, into jobs I’d argue majorly contribute nothing to society but are megabucks compensated starting with lucrative summer internships during college. Some of that top talent should be considering teaching and other jobs that do a social good.
Can you think of at least one really good teacher who helped you learn an absolute ton and grow as a person? Now what if we had a school system of those people? (Not to say those people must come from Ivy League schools, that’s certainly not true - I just think that speaks to how the incentive structure is all wrong.)
Retirement at 55?? 😂😂 I know literally zero teachers who have retired at 55. Every teacher I know who has retired has done so between 60-65, usually around 62-63.
Depends on the state I suppose - NY is 55 for full pension. To pick a random red state, Kansas is 60 for full pension. I am not anti teacher and I don’t think teacher pensions are excessive anywhere, just saying their pay is better than salary alone would suggest since private sector salaries need to account for retirement savings etc.
I do think the pay structure is bad but that’s not the fault of teachers, it’s the fault of their bosses and politicians who want future bosses/politicians to pay their bills instead
Teachers' unions wield vast political power in blue states like New York and California. If the unions took a stand against grade inflation in those states, they could not be ignored.
We spend more than most developed nations on education on a per pupil basis. Mississippi has produced major gains for its students while spending very little. While I think teachers should be well-compensated (and rewarded for strong results!), the link between spending and education is tenuous.
Where I live teachers top out at around $90k and have great benefits. To my mind the issue is not that unions contribute to grade inflation, it’s that they do not use their political power to fight grade inflation.
Something like 40% of Chicago teachers are chronically absent and Chicago has the test scores to prove it. Teachers are just like police officers, nobody is automatically a saint or a hero because they take a job. Everybody wants to get more money for less work and accountability, and teachers are no exception.
Gary, give me a break. Teacher's unions are the students greatest ally, in every way.
Having been out of school for a while, I'm surprised to learn of this "AP-for-All" thing.
I actually took two AP tests while I was a HS junior, without taking AP classes first. I just paid for the tests and took them. I got a 4 on one test, and a 3 on the other. I mean — I studied, of course…
District admin were shocked… although I have no idea why. There were only something like 5 kids from our 2000+ student high school who passed AP tests as juniors, and each of the others were considered prodigies. I was the oddball, but I can't emphasize how easy it was to just cut a check for the test fee, and sit down for a few hours to write in a blue book. There were literally no obstacles at all.
I took an AP class in German, and the teacher made it clear to us that he expected everyone to score a 4 or 5. He said he'd never once had a student score a 3 in all his years of teaching.
I was so nervous during the test that I didn't answer any of the questions that required speaking into a recorder. That was like half the test. But I still got a 5.
If that many students are failing AP tests, that's a concern.
That's a wild story. Some might find cause for doubt but, having been through this myself, I totally believe it.
I took a class called "Honors U.S. History" while I was a HS sophomore, over a year earlier. We spent an entire semester on the Civil War, and touched lightly on a most of the rest of the lessons. I think that's why I "only" scored a 3 on the AP American History test. I'd just that week finished a class in European History — although it wasn't an "honors" class, and certainly not an "AP" class. I got a 4 on that topic.
Testing took place in a 50-seat classroom in the Central Admin. building, which was the HQ for each of the nine districts in the whole *county*, and not just ours. It was responsible for something like 15,000-20,000 HS students. About 20 kids, from all of these districts together (!), took the American History exam that morning but, since I was literally the *only* kid taking the European History exam in the afternoon, the admins allowed me to use one of their private offices.
It was a long day.
I think test-taking itself is a skill. I'm sure there are test-taking classes available — I recall a private company offering them back in the day (but I forget that company's name). I never took one. Maybe I was unprepared — I don't know — but I cut two checks for $50 to cover the test fees (at the time), walked into a building at 9:00am with a no. 2 pencil, and walked out at 4:00pm with college credit for two classes. I agree with you: if kids are failing AP exams *en masse*, even with all of the learning tools, resources, classes, etc. which I mostly didn't have, or else didn't use (maybe you could say the same?) then there's absolutely a problem with our education process. Maybe it's not only a fault in education at school. Maybe there are cultural/lifestyle/economic/personal forces at work which contribute as much or more to the poor results — but it's really a tragedy, IMO. Culture and society are supposed to build forward with passing time, and not regress or deteriorate.
Something is wrong.
I took most of my APs in 2018 and the process was the same. Several of them were through a structured class environment, but several (Human Geo, US Govt, Env Science) I took simply by paying CollegeBoard directly and studying on my own.
They sell preparatory material for all of their APs, and it’s hard but straightforward to put in the hours to study. I received a 5 on each of them, and I don’t think it would be out of the question for other students to do the same. I did have one day in which I had to take three AP exams, so I missed the senior festivities, but c’est la vie. It certainly paid off.
There's no new or old technology, no instructor or tutors, and no facility anywhere which is able to learn academics on a student's behalf.
If kids are failing AP tests, it's because *they* themselves have not learned the topics they're being tested on.
Putting the question of curriculum aside for a moment — it's really a pity, I think, that so much thought and effort has been spent by so many people on maximizing efficiency and ease of learning for kids when the truth is that they're not learning because *they* are not learning. Teach them as you like — use pencils, paper, printed books, chalkboards, and lectures; assign hand-written homework; arrange student presentations, etc.; or else use computers, tablets, e-mail homework, video presentations, interactive computer tutorials, whatever — it will always be down to the individual students to learn the lessons.
There's just no sense in ignoring this fact, although it seems like everyone dances around it.
🎩
How did that work? Each student was given a recorder and expected to produce a tape of them speaking by the end of the test period? Or there was one recorder at the front and people took turns going up and talking into it? I've never heard of such a thing.
not OP but I also took AP German many years ago. I think each student got a recorder. There definitely was not a single shared recorder.
My teacher kinda gave us the opposite impression, though, that a 5 would be really tough.
I’m baffled that you indict AP testing as part of the problem— AP testing is at least an objective standard that requires you to learn math if you want to get college credit for statistics or calculus. A major solution to the problems described in the article is simply to go back to standardized testing, which takes evaluation out of the hands of teachers and administrators and removes all possible excuses from students.
I'm confused on a few points here...
> College admissions becoming more cutthroat and time intensive each year, driving student and parent intolerance for low grades
How can this be the case when fewer people are going to college today than in the past few decades? Maybe parents' expectations are more cutthroat, but it's not like there's a lack of overall slots.
> The youth mental health crisis, which has left many young people fragile and makes schools warier of giving low grades
Is there actually a crisis, or just a set of kids whose parents are unwilling to challenge them, and who are unwilling to challenge themselves?
I also don't understand Jerusalem's unwillingness to assign any blame to the kids, especially as they get further along in school. It's fine to say a ten year old can't know what they do and don't know, but if a teenager applying to selective schools can't do fractions, I have a hard time with the idea that there's no responsibility there.
Getting into 'any' college is not cut-throat, but getting into 'top-tier' colleges has become extremely difficult (with a high degree of randomness as well). Among the UCs, UCLA accepts fewer than 10% of applicants, whereas UC Merced accepts over 90%. Although higher education is seeing some declines in enrollment, the top-tier institutions are not.
The problems of “cut-throat” admissions and grade inflation clearly exacerbate each other. High school students and parents all know they’re competing against millions of students with fake grades, and they have to do what they can in the arms race.
High schoolers are sending out more applications and the elite schools haven't grown much, or at all. This means that the headline rate for Harvard is really low, and the admissions process is quite random.
Kids are also much more likely to apply to elite schools across the country from where they live. True of both flagship state schools and elite private schools. While some of the regional somewhat selective schools have had a drop off.
> How can this be the case when fewer people are going to college today than in the past few decades?
That is a very recent change, isn't it?
AP for All contradicts the notion of AP. Had no idea this was a thing, how bizarre.
What happened at UCSD is that, after California voters banned affirmative action for a second time in 2020, the admissions department stopped allowing itself to notice that some high schools are tougher than other high schools in order to admit more students from heavily Hispanic high schools. UCSD went much further in this direction than did UCLA or Berkeley.
Ironically, emphasizing GPA uber alles has been bad for middle-class black and Hispanic families who strove to get their kids into better schools, where they seldom stand out academically but at least can escape pressure to join gangs. In 2022, only 2.6 percent of black applicants to UCSD from affluent public high schools were accepted, down from an already miserable 6.1 percent in 2020. In contrast, 11.6 percent of black applicants from poor schools got in.
Among Hispanics in better schools, the acceptance rate fell from 19.4 percent to 15.1 percent, whereas 28.3 percent of downscale Hispanics were accepted in 2022.
In contrast to UCSD’s new strategy, private colleges like Harvard love affluent black and (to a lesser extent) Latino applicants and instead worry about whether kids from the hood can make the big jump.
Ironically, poorer whites and Asians have been big winners from eliminating the SAT. In 2020, only 80 whites at downscale L.A. County public schools were accepted by UCSD compared to 536 in 2022. Poorer Asians accepted surged from 310 to 1601.
Without the SAT or ACT, the failure of UCSD to flag unprepared students at the point of college admission makes sense. But how are these students and districts going unnoticed on statewide standardized testing? Does CA not do any statewide testing anymore?
We do (just once in high school— grade 11), and the scores are pretty horrible for English and even worse for math statewide. It just doesn’t matter for anything or mean anything, really. It shows up on our CA Dashboard, which correlates with funding, but so do many many other datapoints like graduation rate, number of students meeting college entrance requirements (this means passing classes deemed A-G), suspension rate, and many others. It’s easier to game the others so that’s where the focus is for a lot of schools.
THANK YOU!
people object to standardized testing because they think teachers will “teach to the test” aka Game The System.
You know what system is way easier to game than standardized tests?
LITERALLY FREAKING EVERYTHING
I thought the concern about "teaching to the test" wasn't that it gamed the system, it was that it would teach the students shallow skills that made them good at taking the test, but would not generalize to other things. Teachers I have known have expressed frustration at test prep taking away from activities like storytime and recess.
I am personally of the opinion that school should have a decent amount of fun activities, even if they don't directly prepare for the test. If we are going to force someone to be somewhere at gunpoint, we should at least have the decency to make sure they aren't constantly bored.
Test prep taking away from "story time"? The classes ARE the test prep. If you haven't learned it in class test prep isn't going to get you much. You can get "story time" when you've learned the lesson.
That simply isn't true. There are a lot of lessons designed to specifically prepare kids for a test and are not part of the general curriculum. I remember them decades ago and they've only gotten worse since then.
Things like story time and recess are an important part of school, they aren't some kind of indulgence that kids get as a reward if they do well in academics. Forcing kids to spend all their time working on academics is sadistic and counterproductive. Besides, if the kids finish the lesson people will just start saying they should learn the next lesson instead of story time. The only way to stop people like that is to stand firm and tell them no, they don't get destroy everyone's childhoods. We banned child labor because childhood is supposed to be a fun and magical experience, not so we could replace it with a job just as grueling as a real job that the kids don't even get paid for.
If they teach to the test that has arithmetic and order of operations, the students would be better off. If they teach to a test that included reading, then at least the students will be able to read. A single test in 11th grade is too late— of course they’re going to pass the students.
California has statewide testing in 3rd-8th grades also for math and ELA, and tests for science in 5th, 8th and 11th grades.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/ai/cefcaaspp.asp
Thank you. Can CA link the UCSD students with their performance on those tests? How did they pass the basic tests yet not be able to answer basic arithmetic questions?
Those tests are used to assess schools' overall performance, not individual students (the scores sometimes come up with regard to whether someone needs an IEP, but otherwise they have no academic impact). It's likely they may not have received proficient scores on those tests.
I run a fairly large PhD program in biological sciences. The students we admit have never looked better on paper. They interview very well. But we are finding that their actual preparation is far behind where our (less good on paper) students were ten years ago. Lots of remedial biochemistry and genetics needs to be taught. As for coping skills, well, that is an entirely different conversation, and not a happy one. Most of the students find their footing and do well, in some cases outstanding, which tells us that their native talent and aptitude is there. But the on-ramp is longer and more effort-intensive, for both faculty and students, that any of us have experienced previously. And it is also quite negative, in that many have a hard time dealing with not getting top grades while they are still in the process of learning how to learn, rather than performing. They are being underserved by their primary and secondary educational experiences.
We saw this in our program for a few cohorts in a row, but its gotten better as the Covid generation moved out. The kids in college during covid (often) did not learn the foundations of molecular biology. But the most recent cohorts have not had this problem. I think the biology PhD program issue was largely covid and not systemic issues that this article portrays.
Hopefully we start to see this move. There was a high degree of helplessness with the COVID cohorts that does seem to be getting better, but the preparation issues don't seem to be abating.
That surprises me. I was in a top statistics PhD program during COVID and the admissions standards and student quality there have risen enormously in recent decades. I scored a 168/170 on the quant section of the GRE, did an undergrad math minor to take many courses beyond calculus, and did multiple summer research programs. I say that not to brag, but that’s basically table stakes to even be considered at a top tier statistics PhD programs. In turn, it was relatively common for students to place out of lower level graduate courses and quickly start contributing to research that is much more complex and mathematically/computationally demanding than in the past.
If the problem, or part of the problem, is grade inflation and dropping the SATs, and prior to those developments, students admitted were prepared, doesn't that also mean that there is some group of students who would have been prepared, and otherwise would have gotten in, but didn't get in because the UC system has denied them the ability to show they deserve it?
Yes, that’s an argument against dropping standardized testing, you won’t identify students who do well on standardized testing but work at a restaurant or something instead of being able to do extracurriculars and get recommendations and may be missed because everyone’s GPA is high and they are undifferentiated.
You’ll also miss kids who figure something out in high school, might not have perfect grades but do well on standardized testing.
Yes, my kid had a 750 math SAT and didn’t get into UCSD. He was waitlisted and never got the call. He has a friend who didn’t get into UCSD, UCLA or Berkeley. The friend got into Columbia. Parents at our large public high school can tell these stories all day long.
Let me guess - your kid is white or Asian ? This piece is absolutely dishonest in its exclusion of what’s happening at UCSD and why - overt, illegal racial discrimination in favor of Hispanics due to the pursuit of designation as a Hispanic serving institution and a back room deal with the Hispanic caucus in the legislature. These students in remedial math are almost all Hispanic kids admitted from low performing schools by design. Admissions knows they’re not qualified. This is absolutely illegal nd the Trump administration should pursue civil rights charges.
Centrist liberals will often dance around the affirmative action aspect of this while expressing frustration about the system failing kids.
The UC system dropped the SAT against despite their experts saying it was crucial in admitting the best students. What was their motivation? Why are some students with excellent credentials being rejected in favor of those who would fail an 8th grade math class? These questions are unexplored.
It's amazing how Kelsey wrote the entire article without mentioning the elephant in the room.
The issue is that for much of students’ primary educations they were just passed forward without concern over whether they showed comprehension or competency with course materials.
If every student gets an A then there is no signal as to where to allocate efforts or where knowledge deficiencies lie.
It's true. I wouldn't have gotten in without my test scores, but Richard Reeves has also noted that dropping testing requirements has been really terrible for boys' college admissions, since they have worse GPAs than girls but higher test scores.
I live in Singapore and am an unusual American who sends their kids to public school where they practice grade deflation so that kids study harder for their leaving exams (O Levels and A Levels) which are the only grades that matter for the next level of education. To get an A on an exam you require 70%. A C is 55%. A is considered above and beyond. B is very, very good. C is average. Even the smartest kids are meant to feel stupid. Math and science is easily two years ahead of the equivalent in the US. Is this a better system? Not completely sure. The pressure on kids is immense and many of my expat friends leave the system because their kids can’t cope. Local kids can’t leave and there is a huge stigma about the intense streaming starting in 3rd grade. (There is a popular movie series called “I not Stupid.”). There must be a happy medium somewhere. Meanwhile my US kids are applying to US universities and admission counselors don’t understand that Bs and Cs are considered normal here. I’d be shocked if more than 5% of a class gets straight A’s.
Anyway, just another perspective.
My own experience is that courses like those you described, where an A is truly exceptional mastery of the material, and a C constitutes a solid grasp of the material, pushed me to become a much stronger student. It was uncomfortable at the time, but I was far better off in the long run for the experience. I doubt many teachers have the fortitude or backing of the organization to do it today, but those who do are an invaluable resource to their students.
Is the idea they specifically try and put in questions that no one/few will answer correctly (almost outside of the course material), some that are more difficult, some you are expected answer correctly, and easy "gimmies" to pull out something that more resembles a bell curve?
That is an old time standard university trick - 80% of the exam material is material that was directly covered in either the book/assigned readings/lecture material and the remaining 20% is somewhat above and beyond that would have been encounteres if the student went a bit above and beyond or had exceptional aptitude. With fractional credit for the hard questions, good students will earn solid B's. There will be a few who earn A's, solid students will get C's. I definitely had exams like that in Grad school in Physics and Engineering.
The teachers would do some curving because sometimes the questions asked turned out to be more damanding than expected. But I had classes where no A's were awarded at all, with the highest grade awarded being a B+.
I was going off memory but one of my physics teachers really did not like having a large A/B skew in testing results (felt this reflected poorly on him, was he testing our subject knowledge well enough) so he tried to add questions he expected most to fail to answer and added a curve (?)
I speculate (without hard data) at how much of this is also driven by parents. Many parents bully the schools who try and fail - or even mark down - their children, and teachers don’t have the support of their administrations. Why stick your neck out to fight parents AND your own principal? Furthermore, (here’s my pet cause), with the phones and video games and entertainment options we have available, students simply don’t work as hard or practice math, music or reading to anywhere near the same extent they used to. Teachers can’t even assign full books anymore, as kids won’t read them! That was absolutely not the case 25 years ago!
So beyond grade inflation and passing-by-default, we may have to admit that many parents are failing to get their kids to work, and are bullying schools and teachers instead.
As always, the most advantaged kids aren’t the ones who’ll pay the price for this. Their parents will step in, hire tutors, or put them in a private school.
So I feel like I’ve heard two narratives about education trends that feel in tension. One is what you say about students lacking an attention span and being passed through with grade inflation in classes with lower standards. But the other narrative I’ve heard is almost the opposite: that schools are assigning more homework than ever, college admissions to even public schools are more competitive than ever, and children are overscheduled and overworked.
I supposed the answer is possibly that the latter describes the experience of the top 10%-20% of students (in socioeconomic status) while the grade inflation and lower standards affect the bottom third or half.
Actually, both these things can be true. If you assign a ton of homework, but only grade it for completion, you can use it to give people A's who are failing their tests. The kids can easily get completion credit by copying their friends homework or filling in random answers. If you make 70% of the grade homework, 20% in-class work, and 10% tests, the kids can get literally 0% for all their tests and still have an A in the class.
Teachers also sometimes say that something is really important to do and the kid can't pass without it, the kid doesn't do it, and they still pass the kid. Happened to me when I was in 5th grade with my president report, and that was 2001-2002. These are problems of longstanding that have only gotten worse with time.
Why has it gotten more competitive to get into college? Because so many kids have these meaningless 4.0 GPAs! When a 4.0 meant something substantial, not that many kids had them. Somewhere very selective might only accept 4.0 students, but there wouldn't be enough of those to make up classes for every selective school, so other schools would take people with slightly lesser grades. When there are enough 4.5 GPAs to make up the entire Ivy League's freshmen class 10x over, the kids need to do extras to make sure they're in that 1 in 10 who actually make it. That's why they're all Eagle Scouts who do varsity lacrosse and coded a symphony-creating app.
And conversely, if you understand the material perfectly and neglect a few homework assignments you can get a C
Indeed, this was my circumstance in high school. My chemistry teacher had to allow me to turn in a lot of late work for me to pass a class that he hired me to tutor his other students in on days before tests. Tests were more meaningful to his grade than the split I suggested above, but turning in lab reports was a pretty significant portion of the grade that I wouldn't have done otherwise.
Grades that show that you complete assignments are not meaningless; after all, it's hard to succeed in college without diligence. But I basically think the university qualifications that were around when I got into the UC system were closer to correct. A combination of GPA, SAT/ACT, AP scores, essays, high school ranking, and extracurriculars was a pretty good way to see who'd succeed in college. I would like to see stronger economic weighting to stack the deck against rich kids who really don't need a fancy education to succeed in life, but taking out the testing was not at all the right answer.
I think your second paragraph is mostly what resolves the tension you see (and is moreover correct), but iirc the data show that homework has gone down in reality - at least, in most countries’ public systems. Could be wrong though, I’m not certain about that point.
More homework?? Who says?
See here, for example: https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/12/health/homework-elementary-school-study
Though that applies to elementary school kids. From doing some googling it seems like for high schoolers the amount is either unchanged or declining a bit.
I mean, that’s a 10-year-old study that seems to address total amounts of homework, not changes.
It isn’t driven by parents. It’s driven by racism and OP has been dishonest in not disclosing it. This is occurring exclusively at low income Hispanic schools. UCSD knows these kids are behind but admits them instead of more qualified Asian and white admits. Steve sailer did extensive research on this already.
Perhaps in the specific context of the university mentioned in the essay. But this goes on in my white-ass Canadian hometown, where my inclination to blame parents is perhaps more strongly grounded.
As a teacher (at a private school full of students with their eyes on fancy colleges), I've noticed the incentives pretty much all push us toward grade inflation. Administrators are happier when parents don't complain. Parents are happy to be told their kids are straight-A superstars (not realizing that half the class has straight As). College counselors act like a B on a kid's transcript is the end of the world. Kids, of course, aren't going to pitch a fit about getting better grades for worse work. And they will drop our classes if they seem "too hard," because they have learned that the point of school is to get good grades above all else.
Really, the only thing holding off grade inflation is teachers' collective and personal sense of professional pride, which is hard to maintain year after year, especially if your colleagues are already inflating their grades and you feel like the only one who's holding the line.
I wish that everyone in the system could treat grades as information rather than some sort of all-important judgment on a student's worth. If we could take the temperature down around grading, we might be able to be more honest and constructive with students rather than just giving them high grades and passing them on.
These aren’t private school kids - they’re middle and low income Mexican kids from the San Diego area. Kids who get 5 on the AP CALC test from Palo Alto and Mountain View are getting rejected from UCSD in favor of these applicants due to overt and illehal affirmative action workarounds
In the UK they simply don't use teacher given grades for anything - the grades that matter are from national standardized exams that are best compared to AP tests.
Maybe schools should show publicly their grade distributions. If the curve is so far skewed, then it would be a signal.
The idea of focusing on GPAs rather than SATs is deeply flawed. Grades are an extremely fuzzy metric. They can be inflated if a student gets the teacher to like them, feel sorry for them, or otherwise manipulate the system. Grading also lacks meaningful standardization between teachers, let alone schools. You wouldn’t determine the tallest student by having different researchers measure different kids with their own uncalibrated rulers-yet that’s exactly what relying on GPA does.
If anything, colleges should stop considering GPAs and rely solely on standardized testing. This would allow true apples-to-apples comparisons (or comparison to an objective readiness standard) and make classroom grades far more useful. Right now, teachers hesitate to give failing students Fs because of the damage to their GPA, which fuels grade inflation and leaves students unaware of how far behind they are. If standardized tests were the only academic metric that mattered, teachers would assign honest grades without worry, and those grades would actually help students identify weaknesses and improve.
Non-academic factors could still be considered. Colleges could continue giving advantages to low-income students, those with impressive extracurricular achievements, or other holistic criteria. But standardized test scores would give admissions offices a clear picture of incoming students’ academic preparation, ensuring the institution can actually support those it admits. After all, a college does no favors to a promising but underprepared student by accepting them without the resources to help them catch up and succeed.
Yes. There was nothing more frustrating as a student than the game of "which professor grades the most leniently". Striver-types would chart their entire academic course based on who would give them the easiest A. They were totally focused on "scores, not skills" which is completely backwards.
A system that relies on objective tests to show proficiency would much better align incentives. Grades don't matter, finding the easiest prof doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is actually mastering the material and learning the skills the course is designed to teach.
There has never been a time when anything like a majority of America's students were performing well in abstract mathematics. There's no falling off because that's not something we ever accomplished. We used to accept that the college track was for a small minority of the most talented students. Now we force everyone into that pipeline. And you're surprised when a lot of those who were forced in are failing?
Why do you think there's been a 30x increase?
The article talks about grade inflation and UC schools dropping standardized testing, which the article implies functioned as a stopgap against grade inflation. That doesn't imply that today's high school students are any worse at math than they were, only that the UC system is now worse at determining which students are college-ready.
Previously, you may have had grade inflation, making it so it was hard to tell which students could cut it in college based on GPA alone, but the students who could not would do poorly on their SATs and either only get into less selective colleges or not go to college at all. Now, without the SATs, UCSC can't tell which students have a 4.0 GPA because they understand the material and which are unqualified, but still have a 4.0 because of grade inflation, which means they will wind up taking a lot more unqualified students, even if the composition of high school seniors remains the same.
To be clear, *I* agree with you, but I think Freddie has committed to a different position, and I'm curious how he explains the data.
Please. I have an honors bsc in cs and math. The sample question posted in the article is not "advanced math". I was taught to solve these in _grade 6_.
This isn't about abstract mathematics, this is about barely-above-baseline numeracy.
I can assure you it was VERY possible to get an F when I went to school.
One must wonder what knock-on effects this has on real learning (as opposed to credential receipt) in the other STEM classes which have math as a prerequisite.
Anecdote time: in 2022-23 I spent a school year as a volunteer high school CS teacher co-teaching a course over Zoom to a classroom of 11th and 12th grade students in an underprivileged rural area of Mississippi. I could give you a long rant about the many, many ways in which those students (almost all African-American) were set up to fail, but lack of real math preparation was a central factor. The curriculum we used, an online Python intro course from Carnegie Mellon, was graphics-based and intended to put students on a path to coding simple games. So, they naturally used an X-Y coordinate system to locate points on the screen where you could draw shapes using their included drawing library. As the exercises progressed, you had to reason more and more about relative position and movement in terms of those X and Y coordinates, and to do very simple algebra similar to that 7+2 = X+6 problem you led with.
None, not a one, of those students could do the required mathematical reasoning with anything close to fluency. All of them had, per the onsite lead teacher, passed the Algebra I course which was a prerequisite for the class. Now, given the timing, some of them must have taken a pandemic version of the class. And the vaunted "Mississippi Miracle" reforms probably were too new to have benefited them back in elementary school. But regardless, they simply did not have the intellectual scaffolding needed to understand how to solve the problems and build the skills in that course.
I was not involved in the grading for that CS class. But I doubt very much that they were all given failing grades. Several of them, after all (and this was one of the most heartbreaking parts!) were clearly bright and engaged and trying their best. And so the cycle of fake credentials continues.
Are you aware that this statement is false, "Any student of any age can go learn anything they want at a community college."? Please read AB 705 and AB1705 and you will see that California Community Colleges are no longer able to offer remedial math courses. We are having to justify keeping trig and college algebra as prerequisites to calculus. The state of California is failing our potential STEM students.
I've taught high school math in low income inner city schools for six years. In most schools, about 2/3s of all students cannot solve -5+2 without the help of a calculator. Most of these students are getting Bs and some As. I've taught a lot of the same students computer science, and they seem to pick up the material reasonably well. These students aren't stupid by any stretch, and most are capable of doing much higher level of math.
However, even the smart kids are never held to a remotely high academic standard. Unfortunately, there's no way to teach an Algebra II class without failing overwhelming majority of students if they were held to the same standards as upper middle class kids. It's unfortunately a lot easier just a lot easier to pass kids along to higher math classes where the teacher might as well be talking in Tagalog given how many prequisites they are missing.
where does the pressure to not hold kids to a high standard come from in your experience?
1) I currently teach at a school that teaches the same group of students but holds kids to real standards. The majority of freshman have at least one D or F. If a school is willing to fail huge number of students, you can hold kids to a higher standards.
2) The first school I taught at was always at risk of having enrollment numbers fall below the minumum threshold. They were afraid to expel dangerous students, or fail kids who clearly could not read or write so we were basically not allowed to fail kids.
3) The second school I taught at truly believed in a lot of progressive mythologizing. We were not allowed to give less than a 50 on any assignments and had a mandate for at least 80% of my students to have As and Bs.
4) More generally, if too many students have Fs that they have no means of raising to a passing grade, classroom management becomes a nightmare. As a teacher, I can't hold kids to standards that are impossible for them to meet. If a kid gets to precalc and can't solve (1/2)+(1/3) (the majority of kids at the highest scoring majority black high school in the state of Indiana), I can't give them an F if they are clearly trying the best,
#3 is wild to me. I can't fathom how anyone would think mandating a very high percentage of students get Bs and As is in any way a sane policy.
It wasn't per se mandated. However teachers who gave their kids high grades would get lots of praise, while those who didn't had endless meetings and interventions to get their student grades up. Eventually most get the hint and just pass everyone along.
Funders love the school. They were always getting all kinds of accolades and money and grants for a million things the school did. Leadership was really good at saying all the right things, and lots of kids were passing "advanced" classes.
Also, 6% of students were deemed college ready for math.
My kids start each new year with weeks of review of more basic concepts before they learn anything new.
Is that not the case at your school? For example, in your pre-Calc class what would stop you from spending the first semester on foundational skills rather than jumping into the pre-Calc concepts?
I don't currently lead teach pre-calc (I push in as extra support for Math) but what happens in practice is one of three things.
1) You stop the class and reteach every major whole in student understanding. The class ceases to be a precalc class, and becomes an Algebra I class. If a kids passes this class, the transcript will say they passed precalc when they only relearned Algebra 1.
2) You plow through and give bonus points at the ends so that the kids grades look OK.
3) You take away everyone's lunch for more math time (which is what we do) and you can guess how popular this is.
Thank you.
#1 is useful to the students if they in fact learn the Algebra 1 material even if the transcript is inaccurate.
#2 seems only useful to the kids who were already ready and likely to leave the majority even further behind.
#3 I can see how this would be both unpopular, but also unproductive over the long run. If studies show adults perform better with a lunch break, how much more important is a break for teens.
#1 might be the least bad option but it still has its problems. There are usually a handful of students who are close to grade level in every class, and those are the only students who have any chance of getting STEM degrees. They'll get to college thinking the are ready for college level math classes while barely ever grappling with any truly difficult math. Its unfair to the students genuinely capable of high level work to never even see high level work be fore college.
(1) they didn’t learn it the first time slow, they aren’t likely to learn it the fourth time fast (2) and then what, do all of precalculus in half the time? You think that’s going to leave them well prepared for calculus?
Not prepared for calculus, no.
If most students arrive in a pre-Calc class without Algebra 1 skills and other gaps in their math understanding, I think it is better to deal with the algebra 1 and other fundamental gaps before going on to pre-Calc work. At least then students are learning. You wouldn’t have so many students in remedial college classes unable to answer primary school and middle school questions.
Ideally, the primary school, middle school, high school are on the same page, teaching students where they are and challenging students to learn and practice for the sake of getting better rather than just worrying about a grade on the transcript.
Well, yes, but that’s just saying we should have students repeat classes they aren’t prepared in with more steps, and without being administratively honest. What grade do you give a student who had to spend the pre calculus year relearning algebra? If it’s a passing grade, they’ll be enrolled in calculus next year. If it’s a failing grade, then they’ll were lied to by the previous year’s passing grade. It’s really rather mysterious who’s in a position to start to reform the situation.
Can confirm number 4. I taught at school where we were literally not allowed to count formative assignments towards the grade, rigid standards were set by an outside body, and it was an urban school where the average student was several grade levels behind in everything. The happiest teachers were the ones who just blatantly refused to hold the standards we were supposed to and gave out As.
And not holding the smart students to a high standard is debilitating to them. School becomes boring and rote. It also doesn’t teach them valuable skills of hard work, persistence, and practice.
Kelsey, there's so much here. Thank you for tackling it. Grade inflation is rampant. I've had parents tell me that they're paying for that A. No lie.
Different actors have different incentives, largely depending on their position in this system.
As a teacher, I am often doing the best I can with the students assigned (AP or not). Hitting pause and "going back to teach remedial skills" is often not an option because of the system dynamics (curriculum police, data point improvements, politics of moving students up or down, the list goes on and on).
I'm not disagreeing with your anger, but the system (as a whole) is signalling not educating. For whatever that's worth.
[_] got my brain to freeze for a second before I realized it was just a blank and identical to using X.
Coffee coffee coffee.
Why are variables always called "X", anyway — I mean, in equations with only a single unknown? Ever wonder why this is?
Sure, other letters which are used to represent constants are off-limits — but who said variables need to be letters, at all? They could be punctuation, or a special characters… or bespoke, funky designs of some kind. Like that symbol Prince used for a while during the 1990s, when he was called "The artist formerly known as…"
That would be fun!
The SAT would (at least used to, I don't know the current version) use crazy symbols to represent functions. Like it would say
"smiley-face x = x+3, so what is smiley-face 5?"
I loved these questions as a high schooler because once you understood how they worked they were often the easiest ones on the test. The "difficulty" of them came from the fact that they were exotic and not typically seen in class, so once you understood them they were basically freebies.
A true measure of intelligence! Being able to figure out a novel structure.
Good on the ACT. Smiley faces rule! 😀
I think simply "what does 'X' mean?" gums a lot of kids up.
This is an interesting perspective; that jargon sometimes gets in the way of understanding. In retrospect, most of the time I struggled to understand a concept, it was me not understanding the jargon, rather than the concept. Especially in college.
I think that often this is because a concept is so basic that it's difficult for someone who has mastered the concept to understand someone seeing it for the first time.
Don't get me started on trying to teach the difference between a number and a numeral to elementary school kids (I hope they don't still do that). Teach how to solve problems first. Give kids a win. Save the philosophical concepts for later.
The first day of algebra we should tell kids: you go to a store and spend $3 on a can of soda and a candy bar. How much does the candy bar cost?
THIS ☝️ (!!!)
I couldn't have stated this better. Jargon is evil. It's an elitist language perversion which defines in-groups and excludes outsiders. It's an instrument of manipulation as well, when custom definitions of common terms are designated as jargon. We'd understand much more — and we'd understand each other much more, I think — if we just stuck with the OED.
Try writing out a quadratic equation in plain English, it looks something like “ twice the area of a square and 5 of the length of the perimeter is ten. What is the size of the square?” Knowing basic algebra is essential for any high school math, and certainly for anything in college. People simply need to learn it, and schools need to teach it.
💯
This is a fantastic idea.
Describing math equations in plain English would be a great exercise for kids who are learning to grasp these skills. It would provide a logical bridge from the tangible, concrete world to the abstractions of math, which they could reference anytime they lose the thread. I think this should be a standard, “best practice” exercise. Have the kids write a bunch of these down and, separately, have them speak one or two out loud in front of the rest of the class. What an idea. 👍
It's for historical reasons, generally attributed to René Descartes.
- Fork
cogito + ergo = X - sum
Students often have trouble understanding that f(x) := x^2 + 1 and g(y) := y^2 + 1 are the same function. If you think about it, that's actually a very abstract insight. It leads to much less confusion if you start off with being consistent about the naming of variables.
Even in abstract math, we often use the variable names to help reinforce some semantic information. x,y,z are often coordinates in space, A,B,C are often matrices, n,m,k,l are often integers, etc.
X marks the spot.
Same!
There's one notably missing group in this critique: parents. When I was in school, and continuing into my adulthood now, where I'm going to kindergarten information sessions, there's a fixation that borders on obsession with grades. That filters down to students. Many parents and students, perhaps a majority, don't really care about learning things or acquiring skills. They care about accumulating credentials so that they can gain admission to a brand name college followed by a brand name job. Some students will cheat to get there. Others' parents will do their schoolwork for them. When students fall short, parents cajole and browbeat teachers not to change B's into A's, but to turn C's into A's.
It's obviously not all students, but it's a very substantial chunk. And it's hard for schools to resist this push because school has become a market, and the commodity being purchased isn't education-- it's high grades. If a teacher grades rigorously, parents will complain and students and parents will figure out a way to get into a different teacher's class. If a school's grades are collectively lower, they'll have a harder time gaining admission to colleges, which in turn makes the school less desirable for future students. And on down the line.
I teach at a UC. I required students in an intro course -- mostly freshmen -- to upload a Google Docs link to their essay so that it could be checked for AI typing patterns. I explained this requirement in lecture, in the syllabus, in the instructions for the assignment, and on the page where the assignment should be uploaded. About half the class did not follow instructions. The inability of students to read and process information and follow instructions is honestly quite shocking, and it makes me fearful for their future.