Grade Inflation Limits You The struggle is real. No, not because students are getting rejected from graduate school because of their C+ averages. No, not because colleges need to concern themselves with giving students good enough grades to not be drafted into the bloodbath also known as the Vietnam War. The controversial fight surrounding a majority of colleges today is how to stop students from getting such high grades. Too many students are getting As, but that doesn’t exactly sounds like a tragedy. At Harvard the most commonly awarded grade is a solid A and the median grade is an A-. Yale isn’t any different with 62 percent of grades falling somewhere in the A range. The kids going to Harvard and Yale are some of the most brilliant minds of their generation, but they do not all deserve As. An argument in support of commonality of As at top schools is that since the kids had to go through such a difficult admissions process, the only kids getting into these schools are so motivated and smart that they of course earn high grades. I agree that the kids are motivated and smart, but that still does not defend why they are all getting the same grades. If everyone is “excellent” then the standards must be too low. If someone were to seek a major where “excellence” is the most objectively defined, one would seek out an objective major, and I would say math and engineering fit the bill. When you take a math test, either the answers are far more straightforward, and often one is either right or wrong, so you would assume that if students at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale are all excellent then they would have the same amazing grades in math, science and engineering, but they don’t. On average, humanities majors earn .4 higher GPAs on a 4.0 scale. Humanities are subjective, and there is something magical about that. There is no right answer to an essay about a personal experience. However, there is good, better, and best. “Excellence” is a wonderful pursuit since it will always change. Of all the people should who should love such an endless pursuit shouldn’t it be the motivated people concentrated into a couple stellar schools? The point is not to reach a certain point, be admitted into a single school, and then have reached the peak. After that point, you are permanently “excellent.” Call me old fashioned but there is no meaning in that. I like grade deflation. Of course there are downfalls, but I like to think of those as withdrawals. If you take a drug addict off of the drug, they won’t feel good for a while. In fact, they’ll feel really bad, but that is by no means an argument for letting them remain addicted. The drug is just a synthetic way for the addict to achieve bliss for a period but then they just end worse off then they would have without the drug at all. Of course most of these kids have been “drug addicts” their entire lives. They strive for great grades and they received them as shown by how they got into amazing schools, so I don’t doubt waning kids off such an unhealthy habit is easy. What I do believe is that once grade deflation can get off the ground, kids will accept the policy and ultimately be happier and more pleased with themselves. Of course Princeton never reached that point with their relatively short lived policy, but kids still enrolled at Princeton and gladly payed the thousands of dollars to attend. Grade deflation is not the enemy, but instead the complacent attitudes that years of grade inflation have created. People don’t like change but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to happen. Grade inflation feels good, but it is shallow and meaningless. The grades are given to everyone and hard work is no different from mediocre work. Even the worst students get low Bs. No one fails, and when no one fails no one learns. The best lessons people learned was when things went wrong, and grade inflation doesn’t allow that experience to people anymore. Getting an A is not a tragedy, but the inhibition of personal growth is.