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<p>Actually, in my second post in this thread, I indicated knowing a teacher in my school who was guilty of gross grade inflation. I am 99% sure that I am guilty of “grade inflation”, but to a much lesser degree than the teacher that I was thinking of.</p>
<p>To an extent, I think all schools are guilty of grade inflation. Some schools are more guilty of this inflation than others. Some teachers within schools are more guilty of this inflation than others within their school. I know that my building is guilty of this.</p>
<p>I work in a school building where 61% of all grades issued on a report card are A’s. I understand that there are some classes where an A is going to be nearly automatic for showing up and performing your role as expected (my favorite of these is Office Runner), but it seems completely unreasonable that 61% of all grades issued would be A’s. What does an A really mean when 61% of the population has one?</p>
<p>If we were to evenly distribute those A’s among every class in the school, that means in a typical class of 30, 18-19 students would have an A. Think about a class that you were in this past year. Do you really think that there wasn’t a significant difference between the achievement of the top student in that class and the 18th best student in the class? I would venture that in the typical class, there is a significant difference between these two students. And if that difference exists, shouldn’t it be recognized? And how would we recognize it?</p>
<p>When a student doesn’t necessarily have to work hard in order to get an A, that’s where some trouble can eventually lurk down the road. I was ranked #2 in my HS class with a 3.99 GPA (got a B my sophomore year, so the pressure of the cumulative 4.0 was never really on) and got a 2.7 my first semester of college. I had no freaking idea how to study, because I never had needed to really do so before. So I “studied” for the tests, but I really didn’t do so effectively. I had never learned how to study, and the expectation that I would learn how to study effectively, independently, was a frightening, frightening concept. But it was also a necessary evil.</p>
<p>And this is what I’m talking about when I say that merely studying is sometimes insufficient. In a lot of these cases, studying becomes insufficient, because it’s merely assumed that this is something we know how to do effectively. This isn’t always the case. In fact, in a lot of instances when the grades/results come in against what is expected, it’s an indicator that what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean to stop trying, and there’s no magic way of understanding what needs to be done. If I knew that kind of thing, I wouldn’t necessarily be a teacher; I would be on a book tour making millions and delivering speeches. 
The truth is, what needs to be done is different for each student, and is something that each individual needs to determine for him/herself.</p>
<p>So when I speak to oli12306 and tell her that she’s really going to need to step up her game, it wasn’t intended as an insult to her intelligence, although I can see how my original message might have come across that way. Quite the contrary, I believe that school systems – through grade inflation – deliberately set some bright students up for failure by allowing them to breeze through high school. I believe that this kind of mentality, set up in part by parental expectations, in part by increasing collegiate focus on higher and higher academic numbers, and in part by the willingness of high schools to increase their grades in order to appease the masses, has severely disadvantaged all of our students to a degree.</p>
<p>As a student myself who has seen the effects of breezing through high school, I would much rather have had the kind of rude awakening that a 2 on an AP test would have brought me in high school. I would have had the advantage of the support network of parents, counselors, and teachers that was present, and had the better ability to expect that assistance to figure out what’s going on. It has to be significantly easier to figure this out in high school rather than in college.</p>
<p>My post was meant as encouragement not to dismiss the test scores as “I could have done better if I had tried”. And yes, sometimes I do believe that the best thing we can do for kids is to offer them a much-needed wake-up call. Students don’t always like that, but I think it’s irresponsible not to even try.</p>