Grade Inflation Leads to Unintended Consequences in College Admissions
It’s no secret that there is a strong dislike for standardized tests in academia.
There is also a well-documented long-term trend of grade inflation in colleges, which has filtered its way down into high schools.
This poses a problem for college admissions directors (HT Joanne Jacobs):
Extra credit for AP courses, parental lobbying and genuine hard work by the most competitive students have combined to shatter any semblance of a Bell curve, one in which ‘A’s are reserved only for the very best. For example, of the 47,317 applications the University of California, Los Angeles, received for this fall’s freshman class, nearly 21,000 had GPAs of 4.0 or above.
That’s also making it harder for the most selective colleges — who often call grades the single most important factor in admissions — to join in a growing movement to lessen the influence of standardized tests.
“We’re seeing 30, 40 valedictorians at a high school because they don’t want to create these distinctions between students,” said Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. “If we don’t have enough information, there’s a chance we’ll become more heavily reliant on test scores, and that’s a real negative to me.”
Standardized tests have endured a heap of bad publicity lately, with the SAT raising anger about its expanded length and recent scoring problems. A number of schools have stopped requiring tests scores, to much fanfare.
But lost in the developments is the fact that none of the most selective colleges have dropped the tests. In fact, a national survey shows overall reliance on test scores is higher in admissions than it was a decade ago.
“It’s the only thing we have to evaluate students that will help us” tell how they compare to each other, said Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania.
So grade inflation, aided and abetted by an out-of-control self-esteem-at-any-cost mentality, is forcing admissions officers more and more to make admissions decisions based on ….. those dreaded standardized tests, because they are apparently the only objective and unfiltered measurement tools still available.
Oh, the irony.
