The January application deadlines for college are approaching. As they do, students and especially parents are having difficult conversations and revising their college lists and expectations in one direction: downward. Ninety percent of parents believe their children are at or above grade level, but according to standardized measures, 12th-grade students have the lowest math and reading skills ever recorded. Only 22% of 12th grade students are proficient in math and only 35% in reading.
Typically, families don’t realize how high the numbers are until they start looking at colleges. For example, in 2024, the average unweighted GPA of an admitted student at UCLA was a perfect 4.0. In other words, the average student had not received a “B” in any class throughout high school, and possibly never even an “A-minus.”
With that realization comes another realization: how unprepared their “high-performing” students are. As the owner of a tutoring business, I see and hear some version of the following countless times: “My child just got her SAT score back, and it’s much lower than we expected. She’s doing well at her school, but scored in the 1100s.”
I’m a conservative student and the #1 QUESTION I GET IS, “HOW DO I SURVIVE LEFT-WING PROFESSORS?”
SAT and ACT scores are a rude awakening, both because parents have been misled for so long about their children’s academic preparation, and because it’s often too late to go back and relearn everything now.
Students discover that their high school grades may not tell them anything about how they will do in college. (iStock)
The latest research from the University of California, San Diego on the academic readiness of its students highlights the danger: 25% of new students who didn’t know how to do high school math had perfect 4.0 GPAs in their high school math classes. Their grades did not reflect their knowledge at all, and so a top-performing student, as measured by grades, might as well be below the national average as above.
In that context, an 1100 on the SAT (which puts the student in the top 40% of SAT test takers) is actually a sign not that the student scored lower than expected, but that the student with excellent grades performed according to expectations. But parents, who assume that an A average means their child’s academic preparation is above average, are misled by false expectations.
The conclusion: Grades alone often tell students, their parents and colleges very little about a student’s actual academic preparedness.
But there’s no easy way to deflate the numbers now. High schools that do this, especially while most colleges have still not returned to requiring the SAT or ACT for admissions considerations, would disadvantage their students with lower grades than those of other applicants.
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Not all is lost. There are more tools than just numbers. In fact, there are better tools to assess a student’s relative and absolute academic preparedness: standardized measures of that academic preparedness.
The College Board, which administers both the SAT and AP exams, should expand its AP exam offerings — as it has already begun with an AP Pre-Calculus exam. We no longer have to wonder whether a student’s “A” in Pre-Calculus means he knows Pre-Calculus or doesn’t even know high school or even elementary school math.
This is not hyperbole. The University of California, San Diego reported that 12% of its students did not meet the high school level in mathematics, and of this group, 42% had taken Pre-Calculus or Calculus in high school. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, 25% of them had perfect 4.0 grades in math in high school. When grades, even perfect grades, are meaningless, we need another benchmark, and that’s exactly what more AP exams would provide.
It is bad enough that without these measures, students (and their parents) do not receive accurate information about their educational knowledge and skills. But misleading students deprives the least prepared students of the opportunity to get the extra help they need and the best prepared students the opportunity to achieve higher achievement – neither group has any incentive to strive beyond the (meaningless) ‘A’.
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The conclusion: Grades alone often tell students, their parents and colleges very little about a student’s actual academic preparedness.
So it is that a truly top-performing student, who could have gotten a 1500 on the SAT, is denied the knowledge and skills she would otherwise have acquired if he or she had been required to reach a higher level.
That comes at a devastating cost: the student is then less likely to not only get into a better college, but also have less trouble paying for college — many colleges give students a full scholarship if they have an SAT score of 1500. Furthermore, holding all other variables constant, students with a 1500 on the SAT are much more likely to graduate on time with less debt, persist in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) major, and earn more.
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Grade inflation is not a harmless embellishment or a victimless lie: it depresses academic preparedness while concealing the decline, pushing students through an education system without the need to learn and acquire skills to advance. That’s how we end up with students who can’t do math in elementary school but have perfect grades in math in high school — and then graduates who have essentially a worthless degree but tens of thousands of dollars in student debt.
While grade inflation isn’t going away, we can at least put those grades in the context of a standardized measure of academic preparedness. Expand the use of standardized testing to all high school grades so that struggling students can get the help they need, top-performing students can reach their potential, students and parents can understand a student’s academic preparation, and colleges can select the students who best fit their institutions.
