Last November, UCSD published a report noting the dramatic rise of freshman students requiring remedial math classes. These math classes cover concepts typically taught in first through eighth grade. The report found that between 2020 and 2025, UCSD had a 2,900% increase in the number of incoming freshmen who did not meet high school math standards.
Out of the current 7,799 students in the freshman class, 665 students are enrolled in the basic remedial math course, filling the maximum number of seats available.
One cause identified by UCSD researchers is grade inflation, which is when teachers award increasingly higher grades for the same quality of work over time. This issue is prevalent across the country. At Harvard University, the amount of A’s has increased by 35% in the last two decades, causing the university to consider capping the number of A’s rewarded to 20% per course, aiming to halve the percentage of A’s given to undergraduate students.
At Westview, school records suggest that grade inflation may also be present. A majority of classes have shown an increase in the percentage of A’s recorded since the 2011-2012 school year. For example, in AP Calculus AB, the percentage increase from 2011-2012 to 2023-2024 was 17%. For APUSH, the percentage increase reached 34%. For High School English 1-2, 40%.
Dr. Barry Schwartz, a professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, said that grade inflation can reduce students’ motivation to learn.
“Grades are useful as informative feedback, but mostly destructive as motivators,” Schwartz said. “When the whole grade range is in effect A to B, and half of students get A’s, the grades stop being meaningful.”
Julia Mulford (10) said she experienced this effect firsthand. While taking a class, she received assignments that were graded on participation, allowing students to give completely incorrect answers and still get full credit. Mulford said that she felt the work had no meaningful impact on her learning.
“You can get a lot of questions wrong and still get full credit,” Mulford said. “It gives you a little less stress about it sometimes, but when I do put effort in, it’s not as fair. It feels like I can try less, and it won’t really matter that much.”
Mulford said she struggled with figuring out how much effort she should put into similar assignments, since they often don’t count for much in the class.
“I’m always glad that I get an A,” Mulford said. “I feel a little disheartened that I could have learned more, but I didn’t. I still feel perfectly fine with an A [though]. And if I’m tired and busy, I don’t want to put in more effort into an assignment that I already [could get an A on].”
This lack of effort can influence other students as well. For example, Alara McPhee (11) said that in one of her AP classes during her sophomore year, she initially worked her hardest. However, after seeing other students put in less work and receive the same grades as her, McPhee decided to scale back her effort.
“It was really easy to get a good grade,” McPhee said. “I was working super hard and then I just saw that all these kids near me [that weren’t putting in effort] were getting the same grades. From that point on, I just stopped trying. I witnessed my friends have that same feeling towards me. ‘I’m doing all this work and I’m still getting the [same] grade as Alara, who doesn’t do anything.’ It’s a rough cycle.”
Despite getting A’s in her classes, McPhee said she worries about taking standardized tests in the future.
“I’m [doomed] for the [ACT] science section,” McPhee said. “[For one of my classes] you [were] allowed to have multiple retakes on the multiple choice assignments. [At the end] I was still getting 3 out of 10 on them and then retaking them to get a good enough score. There was no real improvement.”
An ACT spokesperson said that grade inflation may explain why students’ grades often do not align with standardized test scores.
“There is research to support the idea that certain high school subjects, English included, are more susceptible to grade inflation, which can help explain why ACT scores in these areas may not always align with reported grades,” they said. “In a recent research report, Evidence of Grade Inflation in English, Math, Social Studies, and Science, the percentage of students receiving A grades in English increased significantly from 2010 to 2022, even as the average ACT English score declined. This divergence suggests that English is susceptible to grade inflation where students are awarded higher grades without a corresponding increase in standardized test performance.”
According to Dr. Adam Tyner, the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Center for Education Policy, grade inflation creates a big problem when it comes to measuring a student’s academic potential for higher education. Since there are more A’s appearing on college applications, it’s difficult to tell whether or not a student earned those grades through hard work.
“There is no grade higher than an ‘A’ or a 100 percent,” Tyner said. “That means that the grades don’t just get higher, but they get compressed into an ever narrower range. As grades and GPAs get compressed, the signal-to-noise ratio declines, meaning that we don’t know if someone was a straight-A student because of luck and lenient grading or because they really were one of the best students.”
AP Calculus teacher Bruce Hubschmitt noticed that UC admissions policies were changing to disregard grades in response to the increased number of A’s in students’ transcripts, working against Westview’s inherent academic prowess.
“There is an impression that colleges need straight A’s,” Hubschmitt said. “Straight A’s does not guarantee you acceptance at all the UC’s anymore. In the last four or five years, they shifted how they chose kids. I’ll see kids from Westview, straight fours or straight fives [on AP exams and straight] As just not getting anything. Then they start asking the question, ‘Why did I work so hard to get straight A’s and do all those AP classes if I am not getting accepted?’ UC’s instead want the top kids from other schools in the area, but Westview’s almost being punished for its own success. Take one of our kids who’s middle of the pack and you put them in another school in a place where they may not have as robust of an AP program, and it would be much easier to be the top kid at that school, and then you would be accepted to UCLA. Whereas that same kid with the same talent [at Westview] is struggling to get into UCLA.”
McPhee said she thinks that higher grades have lost their original purpose.
“So many people have 4.0s that [grades have] lost all [meaning],” McPhee said. “They’re just marks on a piece of paper. I think we forget that all A’s are supposed to be outstanding things. A’s are [now] the baseline.”
According to Tyner, the roots of grade inflation stem from the pressure on teachers and schools to create a more competitive GPA for students when they apply to college. Teachers have been pressured by multiple parties to give out higher grades for years now.
“Administrators often exert pressure on teachers to raise grades,” Tyner said. “In research that I conducted last year with a colleague at the Fordham Institute, we found that teachers say that their supervisors are much more likely to ‘be concerned’ if they give many low grades than if they give many high grades. Unfortunately, that often leaves teachers as the sole guardians of grading standards, and it isn’t surprising that they often give in to all of this pressure.”
Hubschmitt said he thinks it’s necessary to provide more opportunities for improving grades to keep students motivated.
“The mission that we have is not to sort our students,” Hubschmitt said. “Our job is to teach our students. Sometimes, they need to fail safely in order to come back and be successful. If a kid isn’t good at math as a sophomore, do I merge him off the math highway and make room for all the kids who are already good? Or is it my job to take that kid and give them opportunities to become better so that they can stay on the highway, and then become really talented in college? By giving those second chances and by keeping those students in the game, you do change the grading system. All of a sudden you have kids who may have messed up a quiz or two that are able to come back a little bit. Depending on what you do to keep that kid in the game, you may change how many A’s or B’s or C’s you have.”
Hubschmitt said he believes teaching methods and strategies have also improved in the last 10 years, contributing to higher grades.
“Teachers have gotten better at doing their job,” Hubschmitt said. “We are at a school with a lot of high-powered teachers, and we have a lot of students who are very grade-conscious. Because of the community we’re in, a lot of kids are top kids.”
When shown the data referencing a 40.25% increase in number of A’s in High School English 1-2 from the 2011-2012 to the 2023-2024 school year, English teacher Jose Lucero acknowledged that policies have changed.
“Nevertheless, there’s still now policies that support kids to pull them out of those CDF range ranges,” Lucero said. “There’s so many circumstances because we talk about kids, their situations, and their academic stress. So, as a result, I feel we responded to that. And that might be indicative in the data.”
COVID-19 also played an important role in grade inflation. During the pandemic, grading became more lenient in order to support struggling students. An ACT spokesperson said that this shift was a big contributor to grade inflation.
“One of the drivers of this inflation appears to have been a widespread shift to virtual learning and the accompanying adoption of changes in grading policies,” they said. “In some cases, grading policies were simply more lenient. While these policies were well-intentioned, they may have distorted the traditional meaning of grades. During the pandemic, grades may have functioned more as indicators of participation or effort rather than precise reflections of content mastery. As a result, GPAs during this timeframe may not be directly comparable to those from prior years or those following the pandemic.”
Although addressing grade inflation will be difficult, Tyner said he believes there are other solutions to rectify the issue.
“Using clear grading rubrics can also be helpful,” Tyner said. “If teachers work together to develop those rubrics—and if they understand the value of strict grading to students—they are likely to help combat grade inflation while also making grading fairer and more transparent to students.”
Kellie Oydna, an APUSH and Honors American Literature teacher, said she feels that giving students B’s in high school prepares them for their future.
“I would rather you get a B here for the first time than in college,” Oydna said. “A student at NYU texted [me] and said, ‘I am walking out of a math midterm that I am pretty sure I failed, and I’m just replaying in my head you telling me that my grades don’t define me.’ You’re gonna fail in college at some point, or in life at some point. It’s better to do it when you have a support system.”
