Straight “A” Students: Progress or Red Herring?
By Neil Gonsalves | Exploring the impacts of grade inflation and the commodification of education on social mobility and student success.
Written by Neil Gonsalves for Seeking Veritas on Substack
Why do you send your kids to school? Other than the obvious legal requirements while they are minors, most people acknowledge that school serves two distinct functions. Formally it is meant to provide the foundational skills necessary for future advanced learning, and informally it serves as an important means of socialization. Post secondary level education by comparison is valued by its related function of creating opportunities for social mobility.
For a select few whose social status puts them among the most affluent, ascriptive characteristics like family of origin will routinely guarantee their progeny social reproduction. But for the vast majority of people intergenerational mobility carries significant importance.
Parents, usually but not always, have an innate desire to see their children succeed and surpass the achievements of previous generations. This typically involves being better educated, more qualified, and more likely to achieve progressive employment that will create opportunities for a better life. For the people without affluence, achieved rather than ascribed characteristics of their children will play a significantly greater role in determining their future opportunities.
Assuming a reasonable level of accuracy in my description above, then the achievement process must reasonably require a level of proficiency and mastery in one’s chosen field of study in order to enable opportunities for social mobility. Educational institutions logically should serve as the catalyst for the required skill and knowledge development.
But does the modern education system actually meet this standard?
Inflated Grades
There are growing concerns within the academia about grade inflation at both the secondary and post secondary levels. Oxford Learning defines grade inflation as “a trend that gradually increases average grades over time, often without a corresponding improvement in students’ actual academic performance”.
Data from six large school boards representing one-third of Ontario's student population showed the proportion of Grade 9 students with 90-plus averages rose significantly after the COVID pandemic school closures. The Toronto Star reported data that indicated “Grade 12 averages are on a steady slope upwards and the number of kids entering university with a 95+ average has exploded.”
The Canadian University Survey Consortium found that 70 per cent of first-year students reported having an A-minus average or above in high school. Dan Côté, a sociologist from University of Western Ontario points out that in the early 1980s that number was only 40 per cent. - So are kids today significantly smarter than students in the 1980s?
The trend towards higher grades would not be a concern if it was truly accompanied by an increase in student proficiency, except studies consistently demonstrate that Canadian students have declining academic performance. Between 2018 and 2022 math and reading literacy levels have dropped 14 points on average, and those drops in proficiency have been a consistent trend for more than a decade.
Dwayne Benjamin, the University of Toronto's vice provost of strategic enrolment management, says grade inflation also creates challenges for incoming students. "They may have an exaggerated sense of their own preparedness… Grades are information. Grade inflation distorts the information and degrades the quality of the information”.
Students regularly harangue teachers and professors for higher grades based on their efforts rather than their output. Students have become so accustomed to negotiating for higher grades that they are often offended at faculty who won’t entertain the bargaining.
Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University professor, theorized in her book ‘Generation Me’ that overconfidence prevents young people from learning how to deal with failure. The inflated grades give students the false impression that they are more gifted than they actually are, causing students to struggle after high school.
Fortunately for struggling students and much to the chagrin of any educator still committed to teaching and learning, post secondary institutions are just as guilty of inflating grades as high schools.
A Forbes article shared a report that indicated 44% of educators surveyed say that students today often ask for better grades than they’ve earned. Four out of five educators say they’ve given into these demands because parents and students have become increasingly assertive, and “many school leaders and educators have decided that it’s easier to appease them than to fight them”. They attribute this to education leaders and advocates becoming uncomfortable with traditional notions of rigor or grading.
The other reason students and parents have begun to sound more like customers can be attributed to the commodification of education writ large.
McDonaldization of Education
The commodification of education refers to the transformation of education into a marketable commodity resulting in the commercialization of educational institutions. It shifts education from a public good to a private commodity that can be purchased.
Professor Basilio G. Monteiro at St. John’s University, New York argues that the corporatisation of educational institutions has become the norm and most educational institutions being tuition-dependent, operate with perennial anxiety about generating “a diverse stream of revenue.” The accelerated decrease of government funding has resulted in revenue generation being placed at the centre of every deliberation and decision in managing academics institutions.
The economics of education have changed the dynamics within educational institutions. Post-secondary institutions adopted a client-centric approach to students, assigning a high value to perceived student satisfaction and customer retention. Treating students like customers rather than learners has predictably resulted in students acting like customers. Bad grades make for unhappy customers, unhappy customers leave bad reviews and tend to shop elsewhere for their products, and that has an adverse impact on the bottom line. This often creates the unfortunate environment within which worrying about customer retention takes priority over the foundational principle of education as a social good.
The biggest losers in this dynamic are actually the students themselves. A failure to achieve foundation learning skills and subject mastery will have a lasting impact on their career trajectory, as well as their problem solving and critical thinking abilities, not to mention their social development and capacity for resilience in the future.
If you want a standardized product, that is probably bad for your long term health, requires limited effort on your part, and is delivered with little regard to your well being, may I suggest visiting your local McDonalds.
ECON 101
In Canada, during the 1960s, most people finished high school, entered the workforce and began families. Only a small number of people, approximately 10% entered university, by 2021 that number grew significantly to approximately 66 per cent of Canadians aged 25–34 having a post-secondary education.
Let’s just focus on some basic economics here. Pricing broadly, and wage rates generally, are established by the laws of supply and demand. (Greater the demand, lower the supply, higher the price). Within the labour market the price of labour is based on the availability of the resource. The fewer skilled and educated workers available to fill the required position, the greater the demand, the higher the wage rate. Conversely, increasing the number of credentialed people looking to enter the labour market will lead to an inflation in the qualification requirements for jobs and a corresponding compression of the wage rate, along with increased reliance on precarious labour.
The Pew Research Center estimates that young adults today are significantly better educated than previous generations and yet have less financially stability. - So much for social mobility and a better quality of life.
Reset
Regardless of whether you are a parent or a student here are a couple of things worth considering:
If everyone gets an “A” it renders the grade meaningless. It suggests limited opportunity for growth and learning. It logically means that you are average because that is how math works! You cannot have the same grade as just about everyone else and simultaneously claim to be smarter than everyone else.
Receiving feedback that highlights where you can improve is the point of a meaningful education. If you treat every grade you don’t like as automatic grounds for a complaint or appeal, you remove the opportunity to learn from failure. I’m not sure when we made failure a bad word, but it surely isn’t helping young people. Learning from failures is an integral part of mastery. We used to call it failing forward, and it referred to the capacity to learn, grow, and develop the areas where we had skill, knowledge, or experience gaps.
Equality of outcome is a utopian fantasy. We can’t all be in the 1%. Again, because that is not how math works! Our society needs doctors, lawyers, and engineers but we also need tradespeople, public works, and hospitality staff. Our focus should be on dignity of labour and equality of opportunity for all, but equally important is recognizing the pragmatic reality that a functioning society requires people to fill a myriad of roles - and not all of them require a post secondary education.
I’d like to leave you with two quotes from Randy Pausch, author of the book the ‘The Last Lecture’. They may actually help more than the grades people feel the need to demand.
“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
“When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you.”
About the author: Neil Gonsalves is an Indian-born Canadian immigrant who grew up in Dubai, U.A.E. and moved to Canada in 1995. He is an Ontario college educator, a TEDx speaker, an author, columnist, and an advocate for new immigrant integration and viewpoint diversity.
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Where to begin... The first four paragraphs set the stage nicely. Really like how terms were defined and the issue was presented in a detailed, well laid-out, accessible fashion. Absolutely love the 'Reset' points and really appreciate the third point. Our culture very much equates job title with self-worth, and the attitude towards certain types of labour (and toward those not formally educated) is often one of disdain rather than dignity, so is it any wonder everyone wants a post-secondary education? Seems like a bit of a conundrum: if post-secondary education is key to upward mobility and a better life, and if we achieve the desired "equality of opportunity for all", doesn't that mean even more people will be pursuing such an education? Another question to explore: how extensive/accessible are the opportunities for upward mobility and a better life that don't rely on a post-secondary education? Then there's the question of what actually constitutes a better life, given that mathematically "We can’t all be in the 1%."
Great article with a lot packed into it. Love how it raised so many issues for consideration.