Now, Everyone’s a Valedictorian, but Some Point to Grade Inflation

Stellar students at Ferris High School had a problem: how to share the glory at commencement without putting everyone to sleep with speech after speech after speech.

You see, there were 16 valedictorians in the 385-member Class of ‘97, all with perfect 4.0 grade-point averages.

Their solution? They took turns reading from “Oh, The Places You’ll Go,” a book by Dr. Seuss.

After 10 years of rising grades nationwide, multiple valedictorians are not uncommon. But the increase in perfect GPAs has not been matched by an increase in real achievement as measured on national tests.

That’s called grade inflation.

In other words, today’s ‘A’ isn’t your father’s ‘A.’ These days, ‘B’--not ‘C’--is an average grade for high-schoolers, educators agree.

“I like to compare it somewhat to the emperor’s new clothes,” said education Prof. Perry Zirkel at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. In that Hans Christian Andersen tale, the emperor is hoodwinked--along with most of his subjects--into believing that his new clothes are the finest in the land, when in fact he is parading around in the nude.

“Everybody’s happy, including the emperor,” he said, “just as long as no one presses the truth on the matter.”

The truth is:

* More than 30% of 30,000 college freshmen studied in 1996 by UCLA reported high-school GPAs of A-minus or better. Students with ‘A’ averages outnumbered ‘C’ students by more than 2 to 1. A decade earlier, about 22% had A-minus or better. Report co-author Linda Sax says there was no corresponding increase in national test scores.

* Scores on the SAT and ACT, exams taken by millions of college-bound students, have remained flat or risen only slightly over the last 10 years, test administrators say. Over the same period, the tested students’ reported GPAs have risen.

Marla Meekhof, one of the crowd of Ferris valedictorians last spring, says it’s natural for people to suspect grade inflation, but she’s not convinced.

“I guess I tend to take the optimistic side of the issue and ask what’s happening to our kids,” said Meekhof, now a student at Whitworth College in Spokane, adding that the “caliber” of students could be rising.

Bruce Fatz, another Ferris valedictorian, takes a different view. Contending the honor “means nothing,” he urged in an opinion column in the Spokesman-Review newspaper that just one student be chosen.

Some students beg teachers for higher grades so they can win scholarship money.

Some $653 million in scholarships based solely on academic merit were awarded nationwide in 1990, according to Morton Schapiro, an economics professor at USC.

Baby-boomer parents also push teachers and students to keep grades high. Rules requiring students to keep up their grades to be eligible for sports are another factor.

“The students get upset if they don’t do well. . . . They seem to be stressed,” said counselor Carolyn Keck at Capital High School in Olympia, Wash.

And teaching methods have changed.

Texts used to train teachers offer a range of nonacademic factors-- effort, citizenship, even the home situation--that may be considered along with mastery of the subject in assigning grades. Also, fewer teachers now grade on a “curve,” which doomed a percentage of students to failure, said Catherine Taylor, an education professor at the University of Washington.

This state’s top education official, Terry Bergeson, superintendent of public instruction, believes grade inflation exists.

“We really need more of a reflection by teachers on how they are grading kids, next to some objective standard,” said Bergeson. Still, there are no plans to write rules governing teachers’ grading policies.

State teachers’ union president Lee Ann Prielipp said comparing declining SAT scores and rising grades provides an unreliable “snapshot.” A better indicator would be a district-by-district analysis of grades.

Prielipp, Bergeson and others say it’s more important to focus on a $30-million state education reform effort that aims to raise standards, partly by monitoring students’ progress with periodic statewide tests.

As the standards take effect, “grades are going to mean less and less all the time,” said reform commission chairman Chuck Collins.

Mention grade inflation to staff members at Ferris High School and sparks are likely to fly.

“What the kids get here on this campus, they earn. Kids pay the price to get the grades,” Ferris Principal Jon Bentz said.

Last year, 167 juniors and seniors at Ferris signed up for advanced-placement second-semester courses in eight subjects. The classes, offered in about half the nation’s high schools, follow national standards and may lead to college credit for those who pass national exams.

Ferris teacher Leann Dineen offered an example of good research. When she assigned her freshman honors students to gather information on the Kwakiutl tribe of Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands, many used home computers to obtain pages of printed material, including color pictures of tribal artifacts.

“At the upper end [financially], the kids are well traveled, computer literate, and when they set about doing their course work, they put their heart and soul into it and their families back them up,” Bentz said.

Pounding his desk, the principal added: “If anybody thinks we’re diluting the grades, they can come here and sit in these classes and see what the kids are doing. I’m sick and tired of this criticism.”