"Grade inflation" made the front page of The New York Times on March 13, 1972. Reporter Iver Peterson laid out the numbers: Wisconsin's average GPA had climbed from 2.5 to 2.8 in five years, and the share of Illinois undergraduates flunked out or put on probation had fallen from 16 percent to 3.7. A Wisconsin senior told him, "I never go to school any more, and I still get wonderful grades."

The story has come back about once a decade since. In 1977, the Times covered a Berkeley report showing that A's had more than doubled as a share of grades at 23 institutions between 1963 and 1974. One proposed fix was to print the class average alongside each student's grade on the transcript. By 1995, Lehigh professor Perry Zirkel was writing in Education Week that versions of that proposal had received little more than "benign neglect."

In September 1998, the Associated Press reported that 38 percent of college-bound seniors carried an A average, up from 28 percent a decade earlier, while SAT verbal scores among those students had dropped 12 points. "We don't know why grades are rising," said Donald Stewart, then president of the College Board.

The pandemic and AI have added complications to an argument that was well underway when students submitted their papers on typewriters.

Ariel Gilreath reports for Hechinger that South Carolina has banned minimum-grade policies, often called grade floors, which prevent scores from falling below a set number. South Carolina is the second state to do so, following Texas in 2009. Supporters say the change will let teachers more honestly report students' performance. Defenders of grade floors argue that a few zeros can leave students with little mathematical chance of passing, even if their work improves. The state's on-time graduation rate reached nearly 87 percent last year. Thirty-three percent of seniors met its college-readiness criteria.

Near San Antonio, Judson ISD has voted to tighten middle school promotion requirements, restoring the requirement that students pass both math and English. The board had loosened the policy in 2024, when officials said more than 1,800 students would otherwise have been held back. At the time, district leaders argued that some students demonstrated mastery on state tests but failed courses because of missing assignments. Board President Monica Ryan says the district lowered the promotion standard instead of addressing the underlying academic problems.

The tension comes through in chief instructional officer Kristin Saunders's assessment: promoting unprepared students does them a disservice, and so does retaining them without providing the interventions they need.

In 1977, the proposed fix was to give a grade more context. This year's fixes come with penalties: 10 percent of state funding for South Carolina districts that keep a floor, and a repeated year for Judson students who don't pass math and English.

— Thomas

P.S. I'm headed to New York City tomorrow for UN General Assembly and will be in San Diego next week for ComNet 26. If you'll be at either, let me know!

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